Summary

Unraveling the value of emotion in contemporary society, the work of Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans explores the person-to-machine exchanges that have come to define the contemporary human condition. Her video installation What the Heart Wants examines what constitutes a person in the digital age and how machines (technical, social, and political) shape how we are “human.” If “corporations are people too,” as in the notion of corporate personhood, then HYPER, an ambiguous power and the narrator of the video, has achieved this ultimate goal. Amidst the dizzying paradoxes of future-turned-now, she is joined by a range of other protagonists: an immortal cell, a memory from 1972 that has outlived the humans who would have remembered it, a disbanded trio of off-grid lovers, lab children with their robot caregiver, and a workers’ collective comprised entirely of disembodied ears.