Mulitmedia Installation
The body of work is a mediation for sympathy, nudging myself and the viewer, to ‘bear witness to something ominous rendered in a cartoon-like manner.’
The drawings and sculptural interventions are prompted by thinking about visceral, bodily pain rendered/transported in images.
Descriptions for the individual video works are written below.
Video
‘Noonday Demons’, is a term from Greek mythology that refers to a thing or a being that lacks the ability to show emotion. I gathered stock portrait images of people with neutral expressions and stock audio recordings of people crying. I ran this combination of images and audio through a lip-sync generative AI model. The model lacked the ability to ‘correctly’ pair the audio with the portrait, hence ‘mis-translating’ the emotions.
Video
This video is a screen-recording of myself taking a full 360 tour of a minecraft rendering (made by an anonymous person) of ‘HMS Gorgon 1837’; which was the world’s first warship that ran on steam. The ship was named ‘Gorgon’ which is a Greek term for ‘a thing that turns anything it gazes upon, into a stone’. HMS Gorgon was launched by the British Empire, and its first target was the Palestinian village ‘Akra’ where it killed more than a thousand people. This ship was one of the many major agents ushered in the long history of colonization and extraction dating back to the nineteenth century.