Duration 8 mn.

• Selected by Ars Electronica x .art Domains for the Global Gallery.

• Selected at the Turku Video Art Performance Festival, Turku, Finland, 2020

• Long listed by Aesthetica Art Prize Exhibition in the ‘Installation, Performance & Mixed Media’ category, screened at the York Art Gallery.

• Published in the Aesthetica Art Prize Anthology: Future Now 2020

• Selected and screened at PERFORMANCE IS ALIVE, satellite art show MIAMI, curated by quinn Dukes, MIAMI, United States, 2019

automated pain? is a quiet performance about the ability to experience and feel digital stimulus and real life pain via the screen as a sensitive filter.

With automated pain? Sylvain Souklaye distanced himself from the digital world and people for a week. For eight days, he avoided reading the news, didn’t go on social media. He didn’t talk to anyone.

On day nine, he woke up at 6am, skipped his cup of coffee, opened his laptop, went to The Guardian and discovered the “Epstein affair”...

automated pain? questions the consequences of our masochistic and intimate relationship to smart devices, the digital news cycle and how it can rewrite our emotional mapping.

“I wanted to know while re-discovering my connection to the world, if I was still able to feel, to think. Or if I was just an ensemble of automated emotions and automatic reactions.
I think I could be automated when I’m locked into digital barbarity because I feel that my pain is a howl smothered click by click.”