STAND BY/ME (2020)

STAND BY /ME is an interactive installation where the information flows and virtual dialogues that are present in ubiquitous networks meet the personal, mundane living space. The work researches and constructs the connection between the empty semantics of politicians’ utterances and values in the context of digital information crossing national and cultural boundaries. At the same time, it plays with the continuity between embedded electronics and digital information, and it aims to capture feelings of confusion, in-betweenness, and instability into an interactive experience. By doing so, STAND BY /ME conceptually connects artificial content with the lived reality of the Everyday.

The grant of project STAND BY/ME is awarded by ARGEkultur and presented from 18 to 21 March 2020, at Ulrike-Gschwandtner-Straße 5, 5020 Salzburg, in the frame of DIGITAL SPRING FESTIVAL. Related link: https://digitalspring.at/20/timetable/event/yu-zhang-stand-by-me/

STAND BY/ME is shown in the group exhibition “POLATECH 1” together with with work of i(inter)national artists Ansgar Silies,Till Nachtmann,Stefan Silies in the period of 27th of August till 6th of September, 2020 at Albert van Abbehuis, Eindhoven. Related link: https://www.albertvanabbehuis.com/artist-in-residence-2020

Setup of the grid of embedded electronics. Computer renderings. Projection interface including Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, and National Lottery for real-time generated text by a machine-learning model.

A recurrent neural network (RNN) is trained with the speech and Twitter corpus and fine-tuned the parameter space to obtain realistic sounding, yet meaningless, empty artefacts of political discourse. The two “speakers” are visually juxtaposed with a simulation of randomized drawings of numbers (balls) from the National Lottery.

Embedded electronics in this work includes 30 linked power sockets, which are technologically extended with sound and light actuation.