【Invitation】The School of Cultural Technology_ Exhibition:The Traveller

2024-02-16 12:00 AM

2024-03-09 12:00 AM

Foyer, Building G, XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang)

SCT@xjtlu.edu.cn

The Traveller is a four-part, four-channel film with accompanying objects/sculptures based on the accounts of Noah and other self-proclaimed time-travellers, which were uploaded to YouTube in late 2017. In these videos, individuals are interviewed in an anonymous talking-head style telling of their travel back from the future, how world events will develop and what the society of the future will be like. With periodic uploads over approximately two years the time-travelling accounts gathered media attention through their frequent predictions, production of various forms of evidence of the future and the testing of the authenticity of the traveller's statements. Having since been largely discredited, the accounts have become a form of speculative fiction.

In the film The Traveller the accounts have been transformed, visualised and re-sonified with AI into a fiction of science fictions. Using data harvesting techniques the AI generated subtitles on YouTube were extracted from numerous videos, passed through a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-2) text generating model to compose them as a complete narrative and finally used as source for AI to generate the spoken-word narration and the edited video. What is created is the result of networked media and the interconnection or networking of various AI with the artist only intervening in the final sequencing process. The film is presented through voice-over, subtitles and sourced footage in a style common to video essays to convince the viewer of the traveller's truth. Yet what quickly emerges is a composite of science fiction tropes and clichés that create a post-truth narrative.

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