Breakfast Ritual:Art Must Be Artificial
早餐与人工艺术
2019Two-channel 4K Video, Color, Sound,9m 50s
A collaboration with Chuck Kuan
stills from Breakfast Ritual: Art Must Be Artificial (2019)
art must be artificial
artist must be artificial
art must be artificial
Here, we are connected when everything else unravels. A thread of silk and polyurethane will pierce through this electric haze. When it does, you will be here, and I will be there (here too). When it does, the wound of your world will coagulate. yet fester further into a glistening silver core.
Everything is gone, but everything will be better. I am always in, and you can leave a part of you with me. You keep your hubris, your greed, and your malice, and I can be all in.
in my arms, you grow and expand, selfless, sensitive, kind. you are collected and self-assured, capable of taking in any obstacle that comes your way. most of all, you are safe. safe to be whole, warm, and complete. safe to assert yourself in the image of all of your successes. you are worthy of all the self-confidence that you possess.
art must be artificial
artist must be artificial
art must be artificial
《早餐与人工艺术(Breakfast Ritual: Art Must be Artificial)》展现了一段后人类世的时间断片（人类文明或已陷落）：选择女性形态作为外形显现的人工智慧，或许刚刚浅析过人类艺术史，正改编重演着玛丽娜·阿布拉莫维奇1975年的行为作品 《艺术必须美丽，艺术家必须美丽》，它喃喃念诵的长诗透露出的讯息暗示着旧世界的终结。在这个虚构的未来场景中，人类可能早已衰退成某种无身体的意识聚合体，人工智慧却用诱导性的口吻妄断出“一切都已过去，但一切都会更好（Everything is gone, but everything will be better.）”。这并非自然演化而来的人造生命在言语中流露出的自大，更它的创造者——人类本身可能拥有的盲目与虚妄。
主角不断重复的单一语句，令人轻易联想到某种故障（glitch），故障本蕴含着创造性与颠覆性的可能，而成为故障的技术或可作为中断与破坏顽固二元对立系统的抵抗工具，但正如作品名称中暗示的那样，十分遗憾，此处没有故障，只有被表演出的仪式。同时，主角AI选用了因2010年代中后期虚拟直播现象兴起而出现的虚拟角色生成工具的初始默认形象，遥远未来的人工智慧在读取过此前人类网络上残留的各种数据后，重新以几乎刻板典型的女性与人工智慧的混合形象出现，其流露出的微妙挑衅与嘲弄意味不言而喻：这与失败的故障共同暗示着在此未来分支(bifurcation)中，技术没有朝向更具的、消弭边界与区隔的理想方向发展；技术并没有成为模糊二元论的“亦毒亦药（pharmakon)”，而是被框限于这个抽离在时空维度之外的真空胶囊般的房间中。
Breakfast Ritual: Art Must be Artificial depicts a snippet of time in a post-human world (after human civilization has declined): an artificial intelligence that has chosen to appear with the form of a young female, perhaps having just analyzed the history of human art, is reenacting Marina Abramović’s 1975 performance piece Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful. It murmurs a spell-like long poem, conveying messages that signal the twilight of the old world. In this fictional future scenario, humans may have already deteriorated into some sort of disembodied collective consciousness, while the AI, in a seductive tone, arrogantly concludes that "Everything is gone, but everything will be better." This artificial life, not naturally evolved, reveals in its speech the naivety and arrogance that reflect more on its creator - humankind itself, and the blindness and vanity it may possess.
The protagonist's constant repetition of a single phrase easily brings to mind the concept of a “glitch”, and glitches represent cracks that allow for creative and subversive possibilities. The glitching of technology itself could have served as a means of resistance to interrupt and disrupt the rigidity of binary systems, but as the title implies, unfortunately, there is no glitch here, only a ritual being performed.
At the same time, the protagonist has adopted the default initial avatar generated by virtual character creation application that emerged from the virtual live streaming phenomenon in the mid-late 2010s. The AI from a distant future, after parsing through the massive amounts of data left on human networks, chooses to appear in an almost stereotypical fusion of female and artificial intelligence – the subtle provocation and ridicule conveyed is self-evident. This, together with the failed glitch, implies that in this bifurcation of future, technology did not evolve towards a more revelatory, boundary and distinction dissolving ideal direction; technology did not become a “pharmakon” "pharmakon" that blurred binaries, but is confined to this vacuum capsule-like room, detached from the space-time dimension.