Donald Rodney: Autoicon [Paperback]

An illustrated examination of Donald Rodney’s seminal digital media work Autoicon (1997–2000).

Donald Rodney's Autoicon, a work originally produced as both a website and CD-ROM, was conceived by the artist in the mid-1990s but not completed until two years after his death in 1998. Referencing Jeremy Bentham’s infamous nineteenth-century Auto-Icon, the work proposes an extension of the personhood and presence of Rodney, while critically challenging dominant conceptions of the self, the body, and historicity. Grounded in a partial collection of medical documents that constitute biomedicine’s attempts to comprehensively know and maintain Rodney’s body during his lifelong experience of sickle-cell aneamia, Autoicon pursues the artist’s address, from the mid-1980s onward, of the British social and institutional body’s cellular composition through racialized, biopolitical power.
 
Autoicon consists of a Java-based AI and neural network that engages the user in text-based chat, and provides responses by drawing from a dense body of data points related to Rodney and his work, including documentation of artworks, medical records, interviews, images, notes, and video. Pulling both from this internal archive and the external archive of the Internet, a montage machine composes constantly mutating images according to a rule-based system established around Rodney’s working process.
 
In this One Work edition, curator Richard Birkett traces the distinct contemporary presence of Autoicon, and the ideas and relations that emerged around its conception before and after Rodney’s death, particularly linking the work to the artist’s seminal 1997 exhibition 9 Night in Eldorado.ló‚