“Luddite” Video Sculpture
Luddite, James Georgopoulos
Luddite is a 2016 video sculpture by Los Angeles-based visual artist James Georgopoulos, from his solo exhibition The Earth is Flat at MAMA Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. The piece is a repurposed Detroit automotive assembly-line robot — the very machine built to replace human labor — standing still and watching. At the end of its robotic arm, a screen plays a human eye: the artist's wife's right eye, filmed on a RED Dragon 6K camera in eight-minute loop segments.
Materials: steel, aluminum, titanium, rubber, concrete, copper, automotive finish, brass, powder coating, and electronic components, with a 35-minute single-channel video and sound. Dimensions: 80 × 79 × 53 inches, approximately 6,000 pounds.
The title references the English textile workers who protested machine takeover during the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s. Georgopoulos uses that history to frame contemporary fears about automation and AI displacing human workers — the tension between technological progress and employment.
*Luddite* was part of a four-sculpture series at MAMA Gallery, all pieces were connected by blue CAT5 cable to Zeus, a quantum-computer-like monolith pulsing with the artist's own heartbeat; Weight Watcher, a 1940s refrigerator with an embedded security camera; and Autonomous X12, a driverless-car chassis displaying real-time AI data. The exhibition critiqued artificial intelligence and the values and hazards implicit to autonomous computing.
A decade after its creation, Luddite reads as both relic and warning — the last artifact of an era when labor was still ours to give, now confronting a world where machines can see, create, and replace.
James Georgopoulos 2016 Photo Courtesy of MAMA Gallery Los Angeles CA USA
