“A Matter of Orientation: Interactive Artwork Recasting Historical Artifacts in Latent Reality” presented by Cheung, Kryzhanivska and Hui
Symposium:
Session Title:
- AI Impact on Media Art and Culture (full papers)
Presentation Title:
- A Matter of Orientation: Interactive Artwork Recasting Historical Artifacts in Latent Reality
Presentation Subtheme:
- Resilient stories
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
With the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in multiple aspects of our lives, AI biases have emerged as a pressing and multifaceted challenge. What can these biases teach us about narratives existing in our cultural memories and storytelling? A Matter of Orientation is an interactive Virtual Reality (VR) installation that speculates on the complexity of this question forged by the Western mode of thinking. Our interactive 3D world, a multimedia assemblage of AI-generated content, tests the limits and affordances of generative AI and room-scale VR that shape the resulting artwork. A Matter of Orientation translates Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism into a new digital reality configured by large language models and gamification of storytelling. Players are immersed in an interactive VR temple that recontextualizes Oriental objects from San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum (AAM) into deepfake videos, image-to-3D models, text-to-image stories and architecture, and generative script writing. In their algorithmic recreation, these historical artifacts amplify the cultural distance already traveled away from their geographic home.
