EVENT MODELING | ZIYANG WU & MARK RAMOS
Event Modeling (2023) is an interactive and live simulated online environment created by artists Ziyang Wu & Mark Ramos, and the third video intervention in the programming of Metamorphosis, the fifth edition of Digital Video Wall, an annual project curated by Gemma Fantacci and structured in thematic chapters aimed at promoting the dissemination and experimentation of digital art.
Event Modeling consists of two works: AI Fossil and #dump. It pronounces how our reality is being mediated and profoundly changed by digital technologies.
Among the content pushed by his own social media algorithms, artist Ziyang Wu selected news and social events and fed their titles into the image generating Artificial Intelligence dreamfields3D, a tool that generates images, 3D models, videos, and other models by prior input of text and images. For AI Fossil, the AI created 3D models from those texts, as if fossilising the filter-bubble reality Wu lives in. In a post-apocalyptic factory scene, visitors can approach the scattered AI fossils to trigger pop-up banners of the original sources and event titles. The work reveals how textual stories can be fragmented and re-interpreted into virtual objects of sarcasm, grandiosity, obscenity, and obscurity, as processed and apprehended by AI.
Developed in collaboration with artist Mark Ramos, #dump is a live simulated online environment, based on the 3D models built for AI Fossil. Ramos and Wu tagged the 3D models with matching keywords from the book Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary (2018). Once these keywords are found in new tweets, in real time, #dump will dump the relevant 3D models into the virtual landscape of a salt mine. Hinting at activities of extraction and expansion, the 3D models will continue to ‘landfill’ the landscape, a metaphor of how digital technology will colonise every facet of our lives.
Ziyang Wu is an artist based in Hangzhou, currently teaching at the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art, and is a former member of NEW INC at the New Museum. His artworks focus on how current technologies, in a cross-cultural context, affect politics, society, and the explicit and implicit relationships between things at both macro and micro levels. With an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a BFA from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, his video, AR, AI simulation and interactive video installation have exhibited internationally.
Mark Ramos is a Brooklyn-based new media artist. Mark makes fragile post-colonial technology using web/software programming, physical computing (using computers to sense and react to the physical world), and digital sculpture/fabrication to create interactive work that facilitate encounters with our own uncertain digital futures. Mark is deeply committed to the ethos of open source: the free sharing of information and data + creative uses of technology. Mark has exhibited his work and lectured widely both online and AFK including as part of Rhizome’s First Look. He teaches Art after the Internet in the MFA Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts, Form and Code at Pratt Institute, as well as Web Programming and Computer Principles in the Computer Science Department at NYU. You can also find him playing drums for various bands in Brooklyn.
© Ziyang Wu & Mark Ramos, Event Modeling, video still, courtesy the artists