Jeremy Bailey: Various works (2012–2017)

Overview

Jeremy Bailey is a self-proclaimed ‘Famous New Media Artist’—an alter-ego he created after graduating from university—and he is also a podcaster and venture socialist. His work consists of all manner of performances in a variety of media, including video, software, websites and innovative inventions. Leading a design team at software company FreshBooks during the day, he makes videos and installations during the night to address the ways in which technology is changing how we see and connect with the world around us. He seeks to highlight society’s uncanny relationship to new technologies and embody the notion that even one software program or platform has the ability to cause a cultural or aesthetic revolution. Bailey’s performances are often humorous and captivating, and his video persona provides a lively, playful and eccentric play on macho tech industry arrogance.

For this exhibition, Bailey appears as the ‘Famous New Media Artist’ in two recorded video performances: The Future of Television (2012) and Nail Art Museum (2014). In The Future of Television, he proposes a new artificially intelligent means to access television. In the future as he imagines it, screens would be embedded in our faces, with content determined by our mood and controlled through certain facial movements, such as raising the eyebrows or smiling. In Nail Art Museum (2014), Bailey invents a new augmented reality software that allows him to curate and host exhibitions—from Renaissance to contemporary art—on his fingernails at the click of an imaginary button. His works raise the pertinent question of whether his performances are comedy sketches or our future reality.

Both The Future of Television (2012) and The Nail Art Museum (2014) were commissioned by Omar Kholeif, the former for the symposium The Future Is Now: Media Arts, Performance and Identity after Nam June Paik, Tate Liverpool, and the latter for ICA, London.