Picturing What Lies Beyond
By Claire Huang
Many ecological imaginings about the virtual digital age, such as the origin of the matriarchal clan and Nuwa, the Virgin Mary, and other myths and religious stories in natural history, were born in women. The world's first programmer, Augusta.Augusta Ada King, inventor of the Internet's underlying STP protocol, Ada. Radia Perman and Heidi Lamarr, and imaginative about what kind of artificial intelligence era to create, we look back and seek inclusive power and more diversity and diverse vitality from women and nature as the mother body; perhaps it is the instinct of life, and also open broader possibilities as the "creator" and "co-creator" of artificial intelligence.
Liu Jiayu's StreamingStillness (2022) explores the transcendence of natural archetypes outside human experience through virtual means. Using two layers of deep machine learning and artificial intelligence, the artist constructed several virtual sets of dynamic three-dimensional graphics based on extensive Chinese topographic data from the Helan Mountains. On this basis, Chinese ink paintings of different periods were used to train AI to generate static, large-scale mountain sculpture installations and flowing, poetic images projected on mountains. Referring to the concept of Yu Gong, the earliest geological imagination and thinking in China, which is said to have originated in the three ancient generations, Liu uses AI-drawn maps to reshape the topography of China, aiming to create a new geological origin for Chinese civilization in the new digital age. This is not only the shaping and imagination of the future virtual landscape and ecology, but also another topological homeomorphism way of dealing with reality and the virtual that transcends the duality relationship; the virtual comes from reality. Still, it does not exist in it, and art is the sum of the past, present, and future, which is an evolving organic ecology.
If we look back a century from now, after 2022, we will be considered to have entered the era of artificial intelligence. In the future, an entirely virtual age, perhaps gender issues, racial issues, and other identity issues will no longer exist, replaced by new identities and systems under the structure of the digital economy. However, based on the current situation, the momentum of the sudden technological leap is insufficient to overcome the real difficulties of continuous war, energy shortages, economic crises, and so on, and to drive society to integrate with the digital and "de-anthropocentric" civilization fully. In the continuation of historical inertia and the extension of the long river of time, artists, especially female artists, as awakening and forerunners of consciousness, may construct a projection of the diversified universe in the "post-human era" in the present world through creation, as a dwelling place floating between "this side" and "the other side." between "human" and "more than human."
Published in The Art Newspaper China, "In the Name of Her" issue, July 2023.