Dareen Abbas “I automata”

I automata:

In the studio, different people were asked: If you were an all-knowing machine, how would you move and look-like? "I Automata" is a photographic project that documents responses to this question, through movement, disguise, and gestures. The project relied mainly on evoking a fictional character mentioned in the story "Automata" by Ernst Hoffmann.Automata is a self-operating machine, often a puppet in the form of a human being or an animal, that has spread to amusement parks and circus tents in the past two centuries, but the entertainment and pleasure provided by these machines are often associated with a mystery: the ability to predict the future. In "Automata" by the classic German writer Ernst Hoffmann, the "talking Turk" machine becomes the talk of the city, with its own capabilities for predicting the future and providing uncanny answers about the future. How can these gears and machines, with a "pseudo" human face, give us indications of our most important human concerns? Perhaps Automata's human face is not so fake as we think, or our human concerns are not of an essentially separate nature from the machine's gears. The project "I Automata" is an attempt to explore this complex and indeterminate relationship between human and machine gears, through a series of photographs documenting an attempt at a collective reinvention of "automata". If you were an all- knowing machine how would you look like?

Dareen Abbas