DATAFICATION〈Act 1〉: MAY IAN VALLEY 0101 (WORKING TITLE) | YARLI ALLISON
In a frantic and random way, rambling images appear on the screen, some seem to be in stastis, others pass quickly from one side of the viewing rectangle to another. A female face, decorated with small spheres and strange signs, clue of an imminent 3D scan, shows strange expressions on the limit between pleased and disgusted in this delirium of codes, drawings and diagrams. Definitely grotesque, even the human’s image is scratched, eroded by a time that seems to have also affected the digital space of the video loop. Datafication 〈Act 1〉 : May Ian Valley 0101 (working title), video work from 2021, looks like a work-in-progress, an image in constant evolution in which more or less recent memories graze and collide generating a collision of different imaginaries.
The scratched screens and lines of code were recovered by the artist from another of her videos, Reward Cycle C1AA (2021), and are here reconstructed by hand, through drawing, precisely to imitate the digital interface but almost make it look ridiculous. In the background, in addition to the theatrical face, a series of legs and parts of the body rub and touch each other, alluding to a human as well as digital sensuality. By throwing all these ingredients into a single cauldron, the porthole shape of the image could in fact recall the alchemical instrument, the artist wants to question the process of man-machine and machine-man imitation. What does it mean to create and make art in relation to artificial intelligence? How do human realities influence those of increasingly advanced AI? In a mix of fiction, performance, drawing, sex acts, 3D modeling and music, Yarli Allison pursues these questions throughout the video, in which the humanization of the machine and the digitization of man seem to dance in an out-of-time tango.
On the left side of the screen, a constant writing LIVE VIEW makes us think of a direct take of what its going on: but what are we spectators of? Once again the artist’s digital and imaginative mechanism breaks down. Playing on the slippage of any possible recognition or orientation, Yarli Allison with this work casts deep and radical doubt on the relationship between the human observer and the digital production of content. The artist asks us who has power over new technologies? How much have these infiltrated our daily lives to the point of becoming an unconscious machine of thought? The world created by Allison has absolutely no answers but voluntarily and conscientiously she wants to throw the viewer into total doubt: the processes of gaminfication, the influence in the collective imagination of AI, the digitization of every aspect of our contemporaneity meet in a delusional and schizophrenic malting pot . The loop gives no way out and seems to lead us to a crazy drift. As the title reminds us, we are only in act 1 of this Datafication and what will follow is only to be feared.
Yarli Allison,
Datafication 〈Act 1〉 : May Ian Valley 0101 (working title), 2021
HD Video with Audio, 00.05.18, loop
28/01/2023