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We need 2 tlk

Hosted at The Exchange between 4 July and 2 November 2024, the University of Birmingham and Ikon presented We need 2 tlk, a new moving-image installation by Midlands-based artist Exodus Crooks, as part of the AI Futures season.

About We need 2 tlk

Commissioned by Ikon and the University of Birmingham, with support from Vivid Projects, Exodus explored public perceptions of AI and reflections on media and technology as outlined in the work of celebrated Jamaican-British academic and cultural theorist Professor Stuart Hall (1932–2014). Produced in collaboration with movement artist Chelsea Gordon, the artwork considers how developments in communication shift our behaviour in conversing with others. We need 2 tlk focused on the haptics and gestures present in everyday phone use and the processing of information from the eye, brain, and hands.

  • AI Futures

    AI Futures ran from February to November 2024 at The Exchange and invited audiences to join the University of Birmingham on a journey into the brave new world of artificial intelligence. AI has the power to transform industries and enhance lives, yet it raises concerns about job displacement, privacy, and security. Through a programme of exhibitions and events, vital questions were explored through the lens of University research.

  • Exodus Crooks

    Exodus Crooks is a British-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist and educator whose practice centres on the relationship with self. Observing the results of fractious domesticity and longing, their art tends to appear as questions of self-actualisation. Their breadth of experience in visual and performance art and education can be found in their work with the International Curators Forum, iniva, The New Art Gallery Walsall and The National Gallery, London.

This new commission was supported by the University of Birmingham and Ikon Investment Fund. It is the latest in a series of collaborations between Ikon and The Exchange, including Foka Wolf, Why Are We Stuck in Hospital?, and Vanley Burke, A Gift to Birmingham.

Exodus Crooks at The Exchange was presented as part of Ikon’s 60th anniversary year. It followed Exodus Crooks’ exhibition Epiphany (Temporaire) at Ikon Gallery (9 February – 21 April 2024), commissioned by Ort Gallery and International Curators Forum (ICF), and curated by Orphée Kashala.

Watch our exhibition video

Learn more about the collaboration behind this installation and the artistic process applied by Exodus Crooks.

Film by Paul Stringer

Transcript

Linzi Stauvers, Artistic Director (Education) Ikon:
Ikon has been partnering with the University of Birmingham’s Exchange City Centre venue in Centenary Square for the past two years. We’ve been co-curating installations and events that bring together academics, artists, and communities across areas of research such as education, social policy, the arts, and law.

Ikon occupies a Grade II listed building that was originally built as a school in the late nineteenth century, and artists and curators often respond to the architecture of that space when developing exhibitions. For this project, we invited the artist Exodus Crooks to respond to the Exchange’s architecture.

The Exchange was originally designed as Birmingham’s Municipal Bank in the early 1930s. After touring the building, Exodus chose to create an installation for the vaults, which are hidden in the basement. We co-commissioned Exodus to create a new digital installation in response to the Exchange’s theme of AI Futures. You can really see why the vaults were chosen as the location for this work — they have a very early twentieth-century Art Deco, futurist feel.

Exodus Crooks, Artist:
We Need to Talk is a moving-image installation piece about dialogue and the ways we communicate in a time of advanced technology. Many of our conversations now happen through the use of our hands and the QWERTY keyboard, so the work focuses on the smartphone and the keyboard as a third participant in many of our conversations.

We Need to Talk was heavily inspired by several visits I made to the Stuart Hall Archive here in Birmingham. The influence that Ikon, Vivid Projects, the Stuart Hall Archive, and the University of Birmingham have had on this piece is really about understanding AI a little better. That included meeting with professors from the University of Birmingham, as well as accessing Stuart Hall’s archive.

Through the archive, I was able to see printed material and traces of Stuart Hall’s humanity within the documents — the mistakes, the handwriting, the errors, and the notes he jotted down. That deeply influenced a key part of the work.

The main takeaway I would love audiences to leave with is that the work isn’t about becoming pro- or anti-AI. I’m not trying to push audiences to take a side. Instead, I’d like people to become more aware of their bodies when they’re having conversations — how much or how little we use our hands when we speak, how certain conversations are conducted through our phones, and the role the smartphone plays in communication.