I/O Underflow

I/O Underflow documents Tony Oursler's site-specific commission for the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam's oldest building, in which the artist turned a seven-hundred-year-old church into a staging ground for questions about identity, surveillance, and machine cognition.

The book collects photographs of the installed video projections and sculptural elements alongside full dialogues drawn from the performances, an introduction situating the commission within Oursler's earlier work, and an in-depth interview conducted for the project, all illustrated with material from the artist's own archives. The exhibition used digitally produced video performances, projected onto figures set within the church's Gothic architecture, to layer surveillance imagery, distorted faces, and fragments of code over the building's existing ornament. Text appears in Dutch and English.

Oursler has worked since the late 1970s at the intersection of sculpture, video, and performance, projecting animated faces and eyes onto soft forms to unsettle the boundary between object and consciousness. I/O Underflow extended that vocabulary into an ecclesiastical space, using the church's own history of witness and confession as a frame for his ongoing inquiry into how machines watch, listen, and mimic human presence.