Lifelike sculptures of ‘real’ people representing working-class Americans by Duane Hanson is the latest exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London. These sculptures look so real, they are almost scary.
What makes the work so great is that the characters are all very ordinary. You can recognise the ‘type’ of person and feel you might have seen them somewhere. Hanson pays attention to details telling a convincing story of their lifestyles.
Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about Artificial Intelligence and robots. It looks inevitable that some kind of robots will be introduced sooner rather than later to be used for assisting people.
But do we want them to look like real people?
Looking at these human sculptures makes you wonder if people would really like to have human-like robots at all? Maybe it is better that robots would not have any human characteristics. There is something very eerie and unpleasant, when the brain is not sure if something is alive or not.
The sculptures will make you feel empathy highlighting the life of ordinary people. At the same time there is something confrontational in them.
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