* 100 copies * Soft Systems Music uses facial recognition software as a compositional tool for a sonfication of gesture. Ben Vida transforms the expressions of smiling actors into what he calls a "soft system”—a blend of the human and algorithmic, in which any subtle motion alters the composition

Directed and programmed by E.S.P. TV (Victoria Keddie and Scott Kiernan), “Lifestyle Guru” occurred as a one-night performance inside the office set of their exhibition “WORK”. For WORK, E.S.P. TV made Pioneer Works’ staff the subject of a six-week performative, televisual installation by relocating the organization’s entire functioning office to a studio set in the main gallery. The staff’s “daily grind” was mixed live, on-site, with custom video effects and hourly commercial interruptions in the space. Far from peddling in the sensational tropes of reality TV, WORK instead turned banal, day-to-day office routines and patterns—the movement of a chair, a co-worker getting coffee—into the improbable, playful content of a serial TV program on New York cable TV and online.  Record #1 “Colony”, features Ian Hatcher as a chat-bot deconstructing a technocratic utopia through algorithmic poetry. Record #2, Ben Vida’s “Soft Systems Music”, uses facial recognition software as a compositional tool and record #3, “How to Survive a Psychopathic Presidency” by Jill Kroesen, is well... pretty self explanatory.

Each record is a unique handmade object, laser etched with accompanying material designed by the artists.