Outside the V&A’s new outpost in east London, a nondescript young person stares blankly out across the old Olympic Park. This five-metre-tall sculpture is generic by design, an amalgam of “images, 3D scans and observations” of local people. It is easy to see why Thomas J Price’s idea appealed to a museum eager to engage with the area’s diverse communities – here is the quintessence of east London youth, executed at the scale of Michelangelo’s David – but by smoothing out the differences between individuals it sends out a confusing message.
To aggregate data and identify common denominators is, after all, the logic of the algorithm. So the worry is that this museum will likewise second-guess the desires of its audience based on predictive models, guiding visitors towards things they are predisposed to “like” and away from opinions they are presumed not to share. So it is a relief to find, on entering the building, a vision of how people make and cultures meet that is infinitely richer, more heterogeneous and more open-ended than those first impressions suggest.
