This spatial installation contains video, text, sound, cloth, lighting, ready-made products and sterilization supplies smell. The video is 56 minutes long and plays on a loop. The text repeated over and over again in the video is a common information element of a murder case, following a journalistic template that introduces a parody of real information.
The fictional narrative content is generated from information captured as input through talktotransformer.com's AI model.
For the version laid out on the London campus, I drew on a real student murder that took place in East London. The press release of the student's murder, where the body was hidden and then found, became the source of the input.
For the Düsseldorf version, I took information about the real history of the exhibition space, a low and dark building: it used to be a trinket store and a massage parlor. In both versions, each free AI-generated different text, using different fonts, is looped through the video. talktotransformer.com is a simple web version of the GPT-2 language model based on openAI, pre-trained by various textual information. It fictionalizes the narrative reality in the work and is a metaphor for the second-hand information shaping the text. Likewise, the sound of cleaning movements and song fragments played in the installation are derived from second-hand material anonymously uploaded on the Internet and mixed with processed song excerpts.
Most of the objects scattered in the exhibition hall were purchased from cheap second-hand stores: the information left in the traces of use of the objects is nowhere to be found, and they can be given new space for interpretation as part of a new fictional narrative. The smell of disinfectant cleaning products that permeates the space also seems to explain the paradox of this clean scene. These elements, which contradict the mood of the exhibition environment, hypnotize the viewer while constantly reminding him that everything is fiction.
The work uses a variety of informational symbols that are cut and short to create an association in the viewer's mind of a murder scene. Since these symbols are derived from secondary materials, I hope that the viewer will be aware of the limitations of this imagery in relation to the real while swimming in the imagery.
The exhibition places the text with detailed information about the work. When the viewer realizes that the work is a re-fictionalization of a fragment of a real event depends on whether they first see the description or whether they gradually realize the logical flaws in the scene themselves from the dramatic rehearsal of the information in the objects, sounds, and scrolling text on the screen.
