RAY LC and collaborators. Juried Artist
Constellations
WebXR on the Styly platform
Artist Statement
It is so hard for us to feel the consequences of Climate Change because what happens to us under its influence is intangibly in the future, and changes are too slow to affect our everyday perception biased to feel phasic threat. To show Climate Change, then, we must fast forward the time, and let our own interactions drive its clock. Only then can we see both the promised destruction close to us and also the possibility of our own actions leading to recovery, not only the sense of doom but also what we can do to alter the future. It is with this new vision that we can see clearly the fourth dimension collapsed as a process of renewal, and to see our role not in the immediacy of now, but the promise of a future.
RE:GENERATE attempts to alter our perception of climate change by exploring speculative narratives of the future in the form of machine-learning-created visualizations of an urban landscape under threat. The imaginary timeline moves backward-forward to show our resilience despite destruction.
Adaptation is indeed possible, if we engage with a speculative understanding of potential outcomes.
RE:GENERATE was inspired by cityscapes of Hong Kong during times of flooding. Hundreds of thou-sands of inhabitants were rushed out of their homes and the flooded subway system. The images were so surreal they became almost imaginary. Yet, we recovered, we adapted. In response, to create the art work, Control Net and Stable Diffusion Deforum in automatic1111 were used to prompt the model to generate a surreal video of destruction and recovery in a speculative future of frequent climate change. We con-strain us algorithmically to a generative principle of nonrepetitive variation based on the imaginary land-scape specified in the first frame that is allowed to vary throughout the video without changing the foun-dations of the structures found within. A timer is added to the final video to remind us that the clock is ticking. The video loops forward and backward in time, showing us that the algorithmically generated vision is ours to control. It’s up to us to frame the story, to adapt to the technology.
Premiered in Venice with La Storta Scala Mata in parallel with the Venice Biennale, 20 May 2023.
About the artists
Artists and designers want to see beyond the surface, to envision the future that we cannot comprehend from the technologies we do not yet have. To truly look into places that harbor the unknown, the futures that we cannot predict, we have to look inside ourselves, to know what we desire and fear. We have to know ourselves.
RAY LC explores our own stories about the way we adapt to technologies. His interdisciplinary art-design-science practice creates interactions and narrative environments for building bonds between hu-mans and machines. Taking a PhD from UCLA, and MFA from Parsons School of Design, RAY takes perspective from his previous research in neuroscience (Nature, J. Neurosci, Frontiers in Psych.) into his art-design and HCI practice, with recent work exhibited at New York Hall of Science, Ars Electronica Linz, Saari Residency, New Museum, NeurIPS, Angewandte Festival, Osage Gallery, Macau Art Bien-nale, Videotage, Goethe Institute, Hong Kong Arts Centre, PMQ, Science Gallery Detroit, IEEE VISAP, SIGGRAPH Asia, Kyoto Design Lab; and published in venues like CHI, CSCW, DIS, HRI. RAY founded the Studio for Narrative Spaces: https://recfro.github.io/
Studio for Narrative Spaces is a collective of creative practitioners led by RAY LC at City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media who work with neuroscientists, roboticists, performers, designers, architects to tell immersive stories and grasp how human behaviors are shaped by environmental story-telling.
Credits: RAY LC