In this video bot., the artist presents a portrait of memory built on a machine’s assumptions of how people would think a machine interprets the mind. He borrows aesthetics from existing role-playing action games such as Mother3, Adventureland, Undertale, and ROM, to create awareness of our world in 2018 – a perhaps slightly dystopian impression – and to introduce a conception of memory that sets itself apart from present understandings.
Liusa Wang presents aaajiao
He also displays the wechat circle which could be a Chinese version of Instagram feeds. This work expresses his concerns about continuous partial attention. By adopting an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior, we exist in a state of excitement and alertness and we can no longer concentrate fully on anything. Constant access to media has turned us into compulsive snackers and triggered a cycle of shorter attention bursts, shorter media portions, increased tempo, quicker payoff and algorithmic optimization.
As Bots, spiders or web crawlers are heavily used by search engines to figure out how to rank websites in search results, aaajiao links their basic function with modern users’ illusions and dilemmas about truth. In this age of accelerated planetary computation, there is no doubt that we humans struggle to “remember” and to “think in more memorable ways” as we become unable to rely solely on regions in our brains devoted to spatial memory.
Video
Credit: aaajiao
Credit: aaajiao
Credit: aaajiao
Credit: aaajiao
Project Credits / Acknowledgements
bot by aaajio was done in collaboration with Quanquan
Biography
Born in 1984 in Shaanxi. Currently lives and works in Shanghai and Berlin. Active online as a media artist, blogger, activist and programmer, aaajiao is the virtual persona of Shanghai- and Berlin-artist Xu Wenkai. Born in 1984—the title of George Orwell’s classic allegorical novel—and in one of China’s oldest cities, Xi’an, aaajiao’s art and works are marked by a strong dystopian awareness, literati spirits and sophistication. Many of aaajiao’s works speak to new ways of thinking, controversies and phenomena around the Internet, with specific projects focusing on the processing of data, the blogsphere and China’s Great Fire Wall.
