Rêverie Reset is a system that expands on Yan Lei’s practice of dissolving images into concepts. The video-installation makes use of cutting-edge computational systems and networking technologies in order to reaffirm the artist’s notion of the artificiality of representation and the irrelevance of the image.
Each of the sixteen displays is networked into a system programmed to constantly show images submitted by the audience through their phones and from a local database. Every time an image is uploaded, the software processes it by calculating its average pixel color, while the local, artificial neural network describes it textually, in human-like terms.
Lei constantly probes into the image’s cultural relevance by recursively questioning what is implicit in its act of representation whilst emphasizing its superfluous nature. One could refer to Yan Lei’s creative process as a destructive practice that is closest to conceptualism; in which layers of ideas are superimposed over visual expression in an action that reduces realistic representations into abstract monochromes.
Project Credits:
- 北京技艺云文化有限公司 Beijing jishu&Art Culture Co., Ltd.
