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Past Digitized Spirits 

A place of liberated rules, separate from the conventional restrictions of real life, the gaming world, or any virtual space.

Words by Yangyang Li

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Aussi’s Past Digitized Spirits explores the connection between our spirits and identities in the virtual world or video games. He delves into the concept of avatars or characters that people associate with in the virtual world. To materialise these experiences, he encourages individuals that he has never met before with similar gaming or online experiences to share their stories with him, which he then uses that information to build his own noosphere, where the collective of aesthetics are stored in the virtual and painting space. Within his work, Aussi incorporates black expressionistic marks, which are often seen as vessels for the past digitised spirits of those avatars. The resin he utilises functions like a mirror or a computer screen, leaving viewers perplexed about the realm they are witnessing when they look at their own reflections.Throughout his work, a colour pencil line runs across the paintings, symbolising his envisioned world—a place of liberated rules, separate from the conventional restrictions of real life, the gaming world, or any virtual space. Aussi's colourful world enables individuals to break free and embody any form they desire, be it human, animal, biomorphic, or expressionistic, irrespective of their real gender in real life. This allows them to carry their past digitised spirits from the virtual space into the physical realm of painting.

Essentially, a part of our past spirits has been archived somewhere online.

Q= Annie Li Yangyang

A= Aussi Chen

Q:What kind of inspiration inspired you to create this series?

A:It started off with the work called AnAn, AnAn’s Bird’s Eyes View, Giant Rascal Rabbit, Doraemon, etc., where I thought about the significance of a work of art for an artist. And for me, cyberspace, or the virtual realm, has had an impact on how I perceive myself as an individual in both the IRL space and the virtual space. I’ve adopted various identities online, whether it be a rascal rabbit from SealOnline 2 in my work Giant Rascal Rabbit, or the pixelated snake from Nokia n95 in my work AnAn, AnAn’s Bird’s Eyes View. They have become a record of a past digitized identity as a form of body on the canvas. Our graduate program has guest visitors and artists who are very well-known in the industry. And every week, we can meet a few of them, depending on their schedules. One time, Larry Johnson came to my studio and saw what I was doing with the interview project. At the time, I had already started interviewing other people about their digitized identities from the past, but I only took what they told me, interpreted it in an abstract form, and asked them to “correct” on top of my abstract interpretations. The final results looked just like other abstract paintings, and Larry questioned my tastes in a work of art and asked what a good painting and a bad painting were for me. Then everything just went off from there.

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Q:What reflections and thoughts did you have throughout the process of interviewing people about their virtual image?

A:I enjoy forming connections with different people, pondering how they would respond differently to a set rule. In a way, their role as participants has already become a crucial author and friend in my work. The bond between people is fascinating. They are not just one-time participants in a piece of work. Instead, they will, in the coming years or even decades, as community members and friends, reflect upon the most significant, most connected, and most touching moments they experienced in the virtual space. Together with me, at different times and in different moods, they will record all of these and integrate this part of themselves into both virtual and real life.

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Q:Do the marks in your works represent any symbolic meaning?

A:Yes, each of the symbols is drawn by the interviewees that represent a word from their descriptions of their past spirits from the grand virtual database.

Q:What thoughts are you trying to convey through the words and emojis in the series?

A:The symbols represent words, and the words represent language. The symbols are drawn with a child remedial-like language juxtaposed with their corresponding abstract paintings. It has something to do with the relationship between high art and something your kid can do. Most importantly, the symbols are another form of language generated from a realm like ASCII codes that aren’t necessarily intended to be understood.

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Q:What does the link between human’s spirits and their virtual images mean to you?

A:Growing up as a kid, I always fantasized about myself as other forms of life beings online, whether it be a tree, an orc, an elf, an avatar, or anything human or biomorphic. And whatever we do in the online setting, we leave footprints on the grand server of the online database. Essentially, a part of our past spirits has been archived somewhere online, and I think that is exciting for me because they have been out there, existing as a form of data, influencing others, and creating impacts, whether they are small or large.

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Q:How do you imagine the connection between the physical and the virtual world in the future, as well as its relationship with globalization?

A:Video games have had an impact on our daily lives in regard to how we perceive our identities. The artist and theorist, Hito Steyerl, thinks the mechanisms of games are so expanded in real life, that everyday life is, to a large extent, getting gamified.  Steyerl sees systems of extended surveillance, such as consumer monitoring, or the digital cataloging of any preferences, as being registered in a way which resembles a game. I’m fascinated with the idea of painting as a vessel for capturing (mimicking) online images on its surface, and as a physical form that carries a stream of global spirits. Traditionally, painters determined what they intended to represent from an assessment of their immediate physical environments: recording what they saw with their eyes and expressing their thoughts from their own consciousness. However, upon the advent of the digital era, AI and other advanced technological programs and games have shifted the artistic atmosphere. The majority of content we encounter in real life cannot escape the global network of technology, whether it is in the form of electromagnetic waves, wifi-signals, behavior cataloging via GPS, credit cards, browsing on the internet, playing within different game worlds, or editing in Adobe suite. All these forms of engagement are housed within a decentralized technological sphere revolving around us.

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About Artist

Aussi Chen (born in Taipei, Taiwan) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Aussi is interested in the interconnected relationships between the virtual source of the database and its possible physical vessels. His work involves many forms of collaboration between his interviewees (strangers from IRL or online) and himself. Aussi believes whatever we do in the virtual space, a part of our past spirits will be digitized and stored in the collective virtual pool of databases within the cybersphere called the noosphere creating different cloned identities; his job is to create a community of global virtual spirits from meeting different people IRL or vice versa.

Q:What are your interested topics currently?

A:I have been a fan of cryptocurrency, and decentralized games such as Decentraland, The Sandbox, etc. I think there are a lot more potential and possibilities in NFT games where people will be able to play ultra-high-definition games and actually own items from different games across various platforms like our IRL collections. Right now, I feel like the visual quality and maturity of those games aren’t quite up there yet. I always enjoy reading fantasy, or sci-fi novels something like Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, or 明日骄阳 (MingRiJiaoYang), etc.

The topics Aussi Chen focuses on are at the forefront of the intersection of art and technology. Since the beginning of the 21st century, mankind's long-standing understanding of the concept of life has been completely broken. Aristotle's supremacy of soul, Cartesian mechanism of dichotomy between soul and body, and Darwin's theory of evolution are no longer even relevant. Our cognition of life body, spirit, and mind is broken by automatic control, system theory, and ergonomics. Everything becomes the product of the discourse mechanism of postmodern life science, and all communication becomes part of coded text and intelligent network. In the era of virtual reality where human beings are facing overall disorder and confusion, Aussi Chen explores the identity, experience and expression of human subjects, reintegrating the boundary between reality and virtuality, which has profound realistic and future significance.

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