Crazyuniverse/ Shallow Fake

CrazyUniverse/ Shallow Fake

CrazyUniverse/ Shallow Fake

Crazyuniverse is an online interactive project (https://crazyuniverse.space/) embedded with video elements from the video work Shallow Fake (r u happy to be alive).

Crazyuniverse utters political anxiety mixed up in a style of the technological sublime.

Crude 3D objects, images containing too much/little information, and soundtracks in different languages are all colliding, merging and evolving into something else that is part of a nearby self. In this realm of splendid mesh, travellers are destined to be overwhelmed and disorientated. One may find burnt race-phobia newspaper fragments wrapping around hollow planets. One may hear an AI expressing relatable existential crisis. One may as well be bewildered by the automatic stare of a ‘shallow-faked’ old picture of the artis's-7-yrs-old-self, who was, in the audio, encouraged to make 2 birthday wishes.

The video and audio work embedded in Crazyuniverse as floating screens and rotating cubes is 'shallow fake (r U hAppY tO be alIVe?)' . This work referencing deep fake technology, explores in humour and fear (of the self rather than the tech) the existential crisis in the era of uploaded analogue lives and downloaded artificial minds. The work is a chunk of overloaded, overlapped and overstretched images of many juxtapositions:

There are family recordings of celebrated birthdays and Youtube videos of waking up an upgraded AI. There are ‘inspirational' talks titled "YOU ARE NOT DEPRESSED" and interviews of a schizophrenia patient expressing fear of becoming automatic.

This video collage is a crude assemblage of bad jokes and rough analogies. It set off to single out the paradoxes of confusion in intelligence, arbitrariness in originality, and forgetfulness in nostalgia. Seemingly at odds even with itself, may this video find its eternal circulation when populating the fictional world wide web, with the migrating snap-shots, the displaced memories and the orphaned thoughts.

Overall, the work Crazyuniverse, pregnanted with Shallow Fake is an excess. The excessiveness in expression recognises the uncertainty and multiplicity of realities unfurled in various political and personal experiences. The artist hope that an expedition to Crazyuniverse will plant a destabilising seed in pparticipants when they move on to many other journeys in life, with their striving minds, with their screen-dried eyes, and their heart that is forever channelling through the chaos, listening for one resonance.

webpage

https://crazyuniverse.space/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXvx9Or5pNs&t=9s

https://he-yifan.com/index.html

Shanghai-born, London-based artist, illustrator Yifan He @mzhyff (email: heyifanfineart@outlook.com) produces multi-media works that critically engage with subjects such as semiotics and technology. She received her BA (Hons) degree from the University of the Arts London and is obtaining an MA from The Slade School of Fine Art. Yifan won Young Artists of the Year at the 2018 GAMMA Young Artist Competition. She was shortlisted for the Social Art Award 2020 by the Institute for Art and Innovation e.V. Most recently she is commissioned by Margate Art Festival and is currently in residency at spur.world.

Yifan writes in both Mandarin and English. She is a Shades of Noir content distributor. You can also find her work in both volumes of Decolonising the Arts Curriculum zines (collected at Tate’s Archive) and many other publications.

London