Reverse Cyborg Apocalypse in Progress
A sustainable, more humanistic, and emotionally resonant digital civilization is the shield we humans use to resist the darkness of the universe.
Words by Wei Jing
How can the expectations of culture, work, reproduction, and mass technological labor be re-articulated in the context of the new techno-social relations governed by algorithms? The works of Song Ting is in quest of an alternative integrating language to the binary "reality-virtual" relationship. Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto was born out of the late twentieth-century collapse of the boundaries of "human-animal," "organism-machine," "body-non-body,” which echoed concerns about technological culture and political identity. Now, under the domination relationship constructed by the ubiquitous but invisible microelectronic chip "AI era", Song Ting's "Reverse Cyborg Apocalypse in Progress" uses feminism as a practical method to retain, recover, and recreate the groups and cultures that have long been objectified and marginalized in the real society in the blockchain and digital space. It is also an attempt to explore the pratical sequential process involved in subjective cognition in the Cyborg civilization of the future.
This is not just a technological fantasy; it is also an enigma about who we are.
The purpose of human-AI interactive art creation should be to explore how to use the "brush" of information technology—a medium that is both contemporary and deeply intertwined with people's lives—to preserve and store the brightest expressions of truth, goodness, and beauty in humanity.
In October 2018, the global art giant Christie's auctioned a unique artwork. A piece titled Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, an AI-created painting, sold for $432,500. The Paris-based art collective Obvious used an artificial intelligence algorithm called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to create a series of fictional portraits of the Belamy family. The Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, auctioned at Christie's in New York, was one of these works. The Obvious team trained the model with over 15,000 portrait paintings ranging from the 14th to the 20th century. This collaboration between human creators and AI algorithms is referred to by some as AI art. As technology evolves and creation methods advance, the GAN model, with its inherent "tug-of-war" dynamics, has been refined into the diffusion model.
A sustainable, more humanistic, and emotionally resonant digital civilization is the shield we humans use to resist the darkness of the universe. We hope that the beauty of tech-art can light up more stars for children.
Song Ting creates poems and plays with multiple metaphors of dreams and myths using images like butterflies, flowers, and women. By reorganizing and encoding these spaces of consciousness from concrete imagery, Song Ting reveals another non-technological discourse of imagination about culture and ecological space in the cyber era. In work “SEA, SAND, AND FOAM” , Song Ting uses AI-generated graphics to generate a narrated response to the connection between tech colonization and Aboriginal topics. ‘’Ciddhartha" maps and translates representative religious and philosophical stories into the virtual world, and is reborn as a new fable about "truth" and "perfection" in the digital space. "Entangnals" creates a blockchain archive for recovering and re-creating traditional handicrafts like weaving, dyeing, and printing. These crafts are mainly practiced by women and underage laborers in ethnic minority groups in Southeast Asia.
Song Ting's "Reverse Cyborg Apocalypse in Progress" invites viewers to explore the intersection of technology and humanity, while also attempting to explore a symbiotic, fusion-based solution that connects "reality" and "virtuality". This is not just a technological fantasy; it is also an enigma about who we are. It is not just an imagination about “on-boarding” and cognition in the age of algorithms; it is also a vision about how to explore the possibilities outside of the Apocalypse of the "Matrix" made up of coded words.
About Artist
Ting Song, renowned AI and NFT artist, the first crypto artist in the world collected by a national museum.
Her 2020 individual exhibition "The Re-cyborg Cathedral and Bazaar” is Asia’s first ever lockchain- based AI art exhibition. In 2021, she was listed in the Forbes 30under30 Artists and shot a featured video calledby Chanel Culture Fund ; In 2022, she became the second Asian artist to be included in NVIDIA's global AI art gallery, in the same year her solo exhibition "Re-cyborg Art History: Physical for Digital" was held in Latitude Gallery, New York.
Her AI-Film "In a Peony’s Dream" won the Best Animation at Tokyo Film Awards,"Butterfly"won best experimental film at NYIFA. She and her NFT, "Metropolis" won Toronto International Women Festival Best Sci-fi Film. She won 20 global film festival with AIGC movies over 12 countries. Her works have been widely reported by CCTV, VOGUE, Forbes, CNBC, etc.
And as a hacker and developer, she won ETH Toronto, ETH Mexico and ETH San Francisco all biggest hackathons on web3 all over the world as the only women hacker captain in 2023 too.