Content Live! (2023)
This video work is simulated by a computer live in the gallery. A computer generated character appears on the screen in the style of a TV weather reporter during one of those extreme weather events. The computer generated character is wandering around a topologically accurate simulation of Yosemite National Park, and screaming into a microphone. She has been landed in the middle of a hurricane, and rain and wind beat against the camera and microphone. Her voice is being generated by an AI, however her words are the entirety of John Muir’s 1869 book, My First Summer in the Sierra, verbatim. The book is originally a series of diary entries that read like a love letter to the ecology of the landscape and the flora and fauna that live in it. What we are witnessing in this video simulation is essentially a visual performance of an Audiobook reading. The reports of Muir’s love for the majestic landscape of California in this instance are treated like content to fill a vacuum of newstainment. The multitude of ways of describing the natural world are at play here - the DEMs (digital elevation maps) which accurately produce the topology of the landscape at Yosemite, Muir’s passionate text on the qualities of the world around him, the environmental simulations that reproduce the extreme weather and the day/night cycle, the visual textures which have been extracted from nature through photography and applied to the ground and flora in the simulated environment, the synthesised human voice. These things come together and demonstrate the real-time production of content. Using no new ideas, no creative inspiration, this audiobook reading screams at the viewer for almost 8 hours a day.
