Year: 2024
Medium: HD video
Duration: 60 sec
60s is a video work made using generative AI tools that responds to the launching of Sora, OpenAI’s text-to-video model. It was made during my two-month stay in Iceland as an artist in residence at SIM in January and February 2024. Generated from glacier images taken by eight artist friends and myself, the work brings together different time scales and collaboration to provoke questions about the politics of AI, its environmental impact and where we want to go from here.
60s takes the form of a video wall with nine glacier videos playing at the same time. The length of the video is 60 seconds, which is the same length Sora claims to be able to generate. The first frame of each video is a real photo taken in Iceland and the rest is generated by AI. Glacier has a symbolic meaning itself and carries a certain emotional weight for humans. The video merges the old and the new, the real and the unreal, inviting the audience to contemplate and reflect. The photos are collected by me from my artist friends who stayed at the residency during the same period.
60s critiques the current AI hype and the politics of techno-fix behind it by drawing attention to AI’s environmental materiality. The technology that produces the subject shown in the work is at the same time accelerating its disappearance. The work also attempts to bring in the idea of collaboration and community as resistance, which grounds in my own situated experience at the residency and in Iceland.
Photo credit: Emma Sarpaniemi, Francisco Gonzalez Camacho, Tiia Roivanen, Danni Zheng, Francesco Giordano, Pooja Chopra Bahri, Armelle Tulunda, Daniel Grams