Zhihang Li

b.1996

Zhihang Li’s work mainly focuses on how technology affects human perceptions of existence, scenery, body, and intimacy.

When technology, as an ideology, shifted the power of capitalist societies from brute force to a more non-political, more subtle, rule enforced by means of science and technology. Under this new way of life, technological artifacts sink into the background, changed the way in which we, humans, engage with almost everything. Almost eliminating the raw physical perception of the objective world and creating a direct symbiotic relationship between humans and technology. His works are mostly direct interventions in technology. By reconstructing the relationship between the human subject and the technical object he is exhibiting the device paradigm itself.

Demonstration Video

Two facial recognition modules, both with cameras attached, hang inside a server cabinet. One of the cameras, directed at a screen in which only AI-generated portraits are shown, refreshes every 15 seconds photographing the AI-generated faces and printing them onto thermal paper every 90 seconds. When a viewer looks at the AI-generated person on the screen, their face is also recognised, and so photographed, by the other camera which immediately prints their portrait onto another strip of thermal paper. The printed portraits, the real person and the never-existed AI-generated person, face each other as they fall into the alcohol below and disappear.

Medium:

server cabinets, silicone, raspberry pi, camera modules, screen modules, cables, acrylic, face recognition algorithms

Size:

185cmx85cmx90cm

AI Existence

Medium:

Computer motherboards, blanket, water

Size:

100cmx200cmx5cm

Mother

Medium:

UV print on aluminum dibond

Size:

60cmx90cm

Body Derealization Senses

‘[Parrhasius], it is recorded, entered into a competition with Zeuxis, who produced a picture of grapes so successfully represented that birds flew up to the stage-buildings; whereupon Parrhasius himself produced such a realistic picture of a curtain that Zeuxis, proud of the verdict of the birds, requested that the curtain should now be drawn and the picture displayed; and when he realized his mistake, with a modesty that did him honour he yielded up the prize, saying that whereas he had deceived birds Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.’