Alex Israel

Gagosian is pleased to present Alex Israel’s seven-channel interactive AI-powered video installation REMEMBR (2023), opening at the Davies Street gallery in London on June 6, 2024.

Ever wondered what your life might look like flashing before your eyes? And if you shared this montage as a selection of images from your camera roll—publicly and without control over what exactly would be featured—might the experience make you feel vulnerable in a whole new way? Would it feel like performing karaoke, but in pictures instead of songs? Would you feel like the star of your own movie, or like an influencer posting an #ad? Like a gambler never knowing what card will be drawn next, or maybe even like an artist, exposing your self-portrait to the court of popular opinion?

I have over 100,000 photos and videos on my iPhone. The pocket-sized smart device reports on the weather and tracks my steps, but it’s also become an external hard drive for my brain—allowing me to create and store an ever-expanding abundance of content. I wanted to find an engaging (and maybe even exciting) way to enter the cloud and scroll through these mementos, but without literally having to scroll through them. The Apple Photos app sends me short edited clips culled from this database that, on occasion, remind, surprise, and move me. My goal in building REMEMBR was to create similarly poignant memories for myself and for others, but at a scale and with a degree of drama that ups the emotional stakes for everyone. Could it cover a lot more ground? Could it become exhilarating?”

Each two-minute super-memory created by REMEMBR is made possible with the aid of artificial intelligence. REMEMBR selects and combines multiple categories of each user’s content, edits and synchronizes it all to an infectious pop beat, weaves it together with colorful animation, and choreographs its presentation across seven large screens shaped after my Self-Portrait works.

—Alex Israel