Portrait Project
Video Installation. Single-channel video in an infinite loop, color, silent.

In the digital age, the meaning of images has become increasingly complex, especially when it comes to "faces," which hold a wealth of personal information. Today, images are indispensable in our social lives. As digital technology evolves, are our personal identities, histories, and even the ways we remember and are remembered becoming enmeshed in the intricate system of surveillance capitalism?

 

This work collects ID photos of the artist's close associates from birth to the present. Using AI technology, it synthesizes each person's past images into a collective "self" and outputs them as photographs. The images projected onto these photos are generated by inputting past ID photos into AI software that claims to "revive" them, resulting in similar expressions across all individuals. If the essence of photography lies in fixing a moment that has already passed, inherently evoking death, then when these static, dead images encounter AI’s revival techniques, a sense of uncanniness naturally arises. This undercurrent of big data—both us and not us—creates personal identities that are both true and false, real yet unreal. The result is an eerie and melancholic retrospective of images, exploring the longing and questioning of life and memory in the age of artificial intelligence.