Insomniac/Amnesiac (2021). VR installation. Two 36” mirror dome with vinyl prints. Plexiglass floor. VR headset. Pearlescent print 3.67” x 8.5”. 360° video on loop, stereo sound.
Right: a 5-min nonVR excerpt..
“Only secondary intelligence dreams.”
Insomniac/Amnesiac is a mixed-media VR installation that meanders the boundaries of human and artificial intelligence, dream and allegory, cinematic and virtual realities.
The durational, virtual-reality display is an uninterrupted interpolation of two parallel circular projections tinted with solar and lunar hues. They are a metaphoric visualisation of the flattened linearity of time as described in the story, a new era of simultaneous witnessing the sun and the moon. The moving images are products of an artificial neural model trained through revised style-based generative adversarial networks (style 2GAN). The generative image model utilises a customised data set of existing accidental images which were taken by mistake, the accidental release of shutters.
The multimedia manifestation is based on an original piece of writing (full text), in which an advancement of machine dreaming and the prevalence of an insomniac population have rewritten the biological and temporal protocols of day and night. In this speculative fiction where human genes have evolved to resist blue rays, machines are regularly put to sleep as a protective procedure against malware.
In all modes of reality, literal, sculptural and virtual, fictions are forward-looking provocations as much as cadavers of the past; returning to Deleuze, they are the crystal of time. Inspired by his writing on Michael Serres’ theory of shadows, against a projection of the synthetic sun and the artificial moon, the bodies of participants inevitably transform into the inverse of the projection, the opaqueness that cannot be exposed by analysis and hence refracts us into infinite speculation.