"Loops"

Loops is a project made in summer 2019 for a residency and exhibition related to Machine Learning, instigated by Anteism Books for their 435 Beaubien space in Montreal.

I wonder what life would be like if lived with less emotion. I wonder about humans making things difficult for themselves or others, and about the futility of being human. This project began as a rumination on a certain personal issue, then shifted towards fantasies of delinquency, desires to mask shame or evade the situation of an embarrassing over-reveal (at the same time obsessing over it and wanting it to accidentally happen).

Hoping to create some distance from the initial impetus of this work while maintaining the sentiment of the experience, I contemplated what “machine” assistance could offer. I tried to chop up a sentence and randomize its parts, to flatten the experience by stylizing it through simple vector graphics, push it into screen-based and virtual form, to evoke, in physical space, the coolness or flatness of a screen. At the same time, I wanted to preserve the “feeling” and have people contemplate a word with an image as if it could divine something for each person in some relatable way. While making this project, I explored the virtual and the physical, sometimes separating them into different experiences and sometimes bridging (qualities of) them together.

In each form that this project takes (a website, a box-set of cards, a wall installation and an AR animation), the messages are fragmented and interrupted in order to render them cryptic, or to create uncertainty about their totality and order. This is an invitation for others to latch onto an image or part of a phrase to find their own meaning, or possibly share an experience through feeling rather than specifics events.

Wall installation of paper and plexiglass, digital print Box with digitally-printed card set and one AR trigger image; animation; randomized image web project: http://jenny-lin.ca/loops.html