Meiro Koizumi

The installation work “Good Machine Bad Machine” consists of multi-channel video that shows people being hypnotized, a robot arm sculpture, and video footage of Tokyo in the past 10 years. In this work, Koizumi tried to overlap two moments; the moment when uncannily the machine starts to look like a living being, and the moment when uncannily living humans start to look like a machine through hypnosis. The title of the work is comes from the classical video art work by Bruce Nauman “Good Boy Bad Boy” (1985). In the Nauman’s work, two actors recite simple lines like “I am a bad boy” repeatedly. While repeating, their acting changes from calm to angry so that the meaning of the line changes as their acted emotion changes. It beautifully reduces human emotional speech act into a system, and questions the authenticity of our speech act and our inner emotions as such. In “Good Machine Bad Machine” 2022, Koizumi pushed this motif further. You see three persons reciting simple lines like “Be a good human”. But, instead of changing the emotion of the actors with acting as in Naunman’s work, hypnosis is used to change their emotions, and see how the meanings of the lines change. In Nauman’s work, the system is created by the “acting” which still has human quality than the “hypnosis” which shows the machnicality of humans in the more extreme ways. Hypnosis shows how mechanical and vulnerable we are towards the words that comes from authority. It not only shows the unreasonable nature of our psyche, but also shows how orders and rules in our social space impacts our psychological reality and behaviors. In the time when the AI, which reduce human behavior into patterns and data, is used to shape our daily life and desires, question about definition of humans is becoming more important than before.