TZUSOO, The Cyborg Manifesto, single-channel video, color, sound, 10min 41sec

The video overlaps the existence of the virtual influencer and activist Aimy Moon with “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) written by techno-scientist Donna J. Haraway. It assimilates Aimy to a sci-fi film cyborg, defined as “a creature that is an animal and also a machine, living in an ambiguous world which cannot be clearly described as either natural or artificial.” Like a cyborg, Aimy is a “hybrid of machine and organism” and has a “mixed image derived from imagination and physical reality.” The artist positions the virtual figure Aimy as the real image that betrays the norms of reality and the knowledge system of the fixed world. To the artist, Aimy is a fictional entity that reflects the real world, and a potential resource of the virtual world that blurs the boundaries between the real and virtual by breaking the norms and rules. Alongside the prominent manifesto, the video declares the new world order and identity that Aimy will be creating.

Lee Eunsol, Wait for the Trust Together, 2023, single-channel video, color, sound, 11min 4sec

Wait for the Trust Together portrays the collective care and creation of the virtual figure Kimberly Lee and the conversation between the members of Kimberly DAO about the distribution of virtual currency and its rules, as well as Kimberly’s future direction. The members of DAO share the journey where they can expand the ideas and concepts that the virtual character Kimberly is able to develop, exploring the sense of community formed by a decentralized digital organization and its digital connection.

Kim Hyojae, Parkour, 2021, single-channel video, color, sound, 33min 21sec

“Parkour” originated from the word parcours, which means “journey” in French. It is an athletic training discipline that involves overcoming various obstacles in urban or natural environments with the human body. Parkour continuously creates movements that escape conventional rules in ordinary spaces. Through repetitive physical training under extreme conditions that could plausibly damage the body, parkour is shown as the act of discovering the point of unity between the body and mind and questioning the self with a physical body. The perspective of the camera attached to the body involving speedy physical movements such as jumps or falls resembles that of online games. Parkour suggests to escape the algorithms of parkour movements distributed through the Internet, which simplify the diversity of parkour and reduce it into uniform data as a sport. It attempts to capture movements as opening the possibility of expanding and performing the bodily experience.

Sophia Ioannou Gjerding, Homage to Airway, 2019, single-channel video, colour, sound, 12min 25sec.

[Credits]
Script, editing & composition: Sophia Ioannou Gjerding, CGI & animation (The Garden & Broken Face): Lars Hemmingsen Nørgaard (Midtjysk 3D Service), 2D animation (surgeons & bear): Kristina Stengaard, 2D animation (dog/chameleon/ox morph, dog/bear morph, walking dog & dog dreamer): Sophia Ioannou Gjerding, 3D animation (trees, chicks & plants): Sophia Ioannou Gjerding, 2D animation (smoke scenes, The Garden): Mark Tholander, Watercolor: Sophia Ioannou Gjerding, Voice (Broken Face): Aoife Slevin, Flute: Johanne Buus Andersen, Tracks, ORKI: 3rd Interlude & Song: Nina Møller, Sound design (The Garden), recordings & final mix: Tobias Sejersdahl, Special thanks: Matthew Travers

The video examines agency as a concept in relation to various historical figures and non-playable characters from computer games, questioning how the minor characters of history could be given renewed agency with a reassessment of the image regimes through which history is told. Homage to Airway takes its starting point in a 1920s photograph depicting the dog ‘Airway,’ who was part pet, part lab animal to two anaesthesiologists, and in a sculpture created by Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff in 1847: a satirical bronze sculpture depicting Germany’s first experiment with anaesthesia, conducted on an old, blind bear in the Berlin zoo. These characters are posited within a tale that takes place in two worlds simultaneously. We witness two virtual scenarios with a tangled relationship to reality—and to each other. The unifying figure of the work is Broken Face, a hybrid between a sculpture and a petrified console game character: a so-called non-playable character. This video brings some of the overlooked stories to the fore and posits historical material within a contemporary setting. Based on this starting point, the artist questions how we perceive the world through the images we produce and surround ourselves with. Homage to Airway is about the status of images and how we live with, and re-code, existing images.

Yu-Liang Lin, The Mighty Sword, 2023, single-channel video, color, sound, 6min 35sec. Commissioned by Digital Art Festival Taipei

In-game items, weapons, mounts, vehicles, among others, are all enhancements to a character’s abilities. As powerful weapons take such abilities to a higher level, collecting and acquiring weapons has become an integral part of a game. When the most powerful equipment is acquired or when resources are heavily duplicated through “exploits,” the game is also approaching its end, which will undoubtedly smother the gameplay experience. This project presents “The Weapon Shop,” “The Exploits Hidden in a Broken Bottle,” and “The Full-armed Knight Ready to Fight,” shown as an extension of his previous solo exhibition Villager A, which featured an electric wheelchair with a boosted speed. The wheelchair is a mammoth obstacle for those he calls the “Knights Templar.” Through the fusion of game mechanisms and character attributes, he tries to respond to the relationship between technology devices and life.

Xin Chen, The Moving Man, 2022, single-channel video, color, sound, 6min 27sec

The title The Moving Man refers to a famous Chinese fable which is about a man named Yu Gong who moves a mountain. However, the artwork title differs slightly from the original fable’s title, changing the syntax and allowing it to be read as “a moving man fools the mountain.” Body measurement as a traditional land surveying technique has become an out-dated approach with the development of satellite technology and the digital revolution, however, it explores more potential of spaces. To meet the mechanical production purpose, new user communities (with the rise of sensors, smart cars, drones, sweeping robots, cloud computing, etc.) contribute to a new geographical topology organization which does not include body measurement. The video aims to create the topology modeling of a mountain by walking with a self-made device as a prosthesis. Each step creates a continuous point in a new virtual space which includes the data of altitude, latitude, longitude, and time. Based on the collected data, the mountain was reproduced in virtual space by using computer graphics methods.

Zi-Yin Chen, How to Improve Photo Quality by AI | Noise Reduction, Super-resolution Tutorial, 2022, single-channel video, color, sound, 10min 40sec

In 1990, the spacecraft Voyager 1 photographed the Pale Blue Dot photo in the direction towards Earth upon the astronomer Carl Sagan’s request. In this photo filled with noise, Earth occupies merely a white dot in 0.12 pixels. A large amount of training data may reduce the impact of exceptions in AI models, thus strengthening the adaptability of the AI models. However, the AI noise reduction model perceives Earth in the Pale Blue Dot photo as noise and erases it with the rest of the photo noises ― are the 12 new resolutions in the AI super ― resolution model based on a universe without us and Earth? The video imitates the style and method of the popular online tutorials in the setting and filming, where the tutor demonstrates the AI image editing software with the Pale Blue Dot photo as teaching materials. While the tutor explains the steps in handling noise reduction and super-resolution and eventually produces a high-quality Pale Blue Dot photo, Carl Sagan’s speech interpolates through the tutorial, “Consider again at that dot.” This tiny blue dot challenges the delusion of human privilege in the universe and unravels the human perception of distance extended by scientific images.

SHINKA Qinhua Yang, Taming the Vistas: Futile Outlines, 2023, single-channel video, color, sound, 9min 35sec

The AI automated image recognition systems widely applied in various everyday scenarios today are actually the result of extensive human effort, involving the repetitive “labeling” of a vast amount of image data, followed by machine learning training. During the labeling process, the dynamic tapestry of life is dissected into segmented images that can be read by machines. The machine’s eye acquires a deceptive ability to deconstruct and imbue the semblance of the world with meaning. This video is an art experiment based on computer image recognition technology. The artist subjectively labels everyday landscapes with “emotional” tags using data annotation software and generates visual reports to challenge the machine’s “justice.” This video aims to provide the audience with an opportunity to contemplate whether the machine’s eye represents true insight or merely an illusion.