Artist's film project for Edit Fornieles featured in Somerset House's "Cute" Exhibition 2024
"The artist created a range of cute characters, called Finis, during the pandemic, which have since mushroomed to a population of more than 10,000, born as “living NFTs”, whose emotions fluctuate according to the value of their cryptocurrencies. As his website explains, they become happy and buoyant when the currency they are linked to does well, and sad or even sick when it performs poorly. (When I checked the listings, many were crying or in a freefall doom spiral.)
His new film, Adventures in Symbolic Love Tyranny, features a Fini voiceover who describes cute, in their childlike chirrupping voice, as “a new kind of emergent technology, a device being used by various parties on various levels to filter, buffer, rally, manage and control”. The chubby-cheeked avatar goes on to quote theorist Frances Richards: “Cute arises by manipulating the guarantee of non-manipulation. Professing its own demure and complete powerlessness, it gains power over and directs all interactions with it.” The Guardian