This Could Be You: 15 Years of Zeesy Powers

This Could Be You: 15 Years of Zeesy Powers is a survey tracing the artist's performance works and explorations in emergent media. Her introspective, funny, and irreverent examinations of external systems of power are experienced through intimate, one-on-one environments. By revealing the worst-case scenario behind our tools of convenience and consumerism, Powers invites the question, “Is this all a cynical reveal we have walked into, guided by our history and likes? Or is she inviting us to imagine an alternative where digital tools are neutered of their capitalist drive and redirected toward the commons?”

Powers is willing to risk it all for the bit, confronting reality by performing the absurd. In her formative performance I Will Tell You Exactly What I Think of You (2005-ongoing), Powers fuses the talk show and self-help seminar genres, inviting audience members into vulnerable—and public—solo sessions, with the artist positioned as “all-seeing.” Using the trope of shock comedy, Powers inverts the expectation of unfiltered truths by reminding the audience and participants that all of her insights are only projections of herself. The work publicly outs Zeesy’s implicit biases, desires, and insecurities while edging against our shared social values (such as: you shall not say exactly what you think). 

Over the past decade, Powers's emergent media works have positioned the viewer as performer or user. They test the tensions between public and private by using familiar interfaces—the body, social media filters, and chatbots—to challenge the hidden mechanics that inform our social and technological systems. In the virtual reality work This Could Be You (2017), users inhabit the avatar of a naked, algorithmically-generated “90-year-old woman.” They are confined to a stark environment slowly filling with antiquated e-waste and consumer disposables falling from the sky. Powers projects her discomfort with aging, confinement, and the environmental crisis, questioning our complicity as insatiable tech consumers and systems of planned obsolescence.

An Averaging Mirror (2015) is a filter that uses facial recognition to blur the faces of gallery-goers. The installation presents its subjects' portraits on a vertical monitor, referencing Northern Renaissance portraiture, one of the earliest examples of private portraiture in the Western canon. Simultaneously, the work evokes the uniquely intimate experience that exists between users and their smartphones.

In deardiary.wtf (2019), the omniscient artist of earlier works has been replaced by the omniscience of AI! The video advertises the deardiary.wtf app which, through machine learning, purports to answer all questions from the quotidian to the existential. The only limitation is the detail and length of participants’ confessions, which feed the algorithm and from which the answers are drawn. In the seven years since this piece was created, this type of natural language processing (NLP) has become ubiquitous. While the ad satirically mentions that your data could be used for anything, all data are stored on local servers, preventing your inner turmoil from being exploited by the artist. Powers calls into question the constellation of issues we face through our willingness to be surveilled, and our fears of being forgotten if we don’t comply.