Warm Water Boiling Frogs: "Simulacra of Real Life"

"The exhibition"Simulacra of Real Life"  suggests using 'life' as a reference, approaching the constantly obscured life through creative approaches such as simulation, imitation, or practice."

This segment of text can be translated as follows:

"The above sentence provides a insightful commentary on the 'Simulated Life' exhibition, serving as the basis for interpreting the artworks.

The exhibition is divided into three main sections: 'Behavior,' 'Scenery,' and 'Media.' Upon entering the venue, the interactive nature between the artworks and the viewers is almost immediately established. Taking the first section as an example: firstly, the placement of the artworks echoes the reflexive actions of individuals entering a particular space, where a quick glance around provides an understanding of familiar scenes such as bedrooms, studios, showers, streets, intersections, supermarkets, etc. Furthermore, identifying what the artists are doing is not difficult; however, the abrupt aspect is the mismatch between these actions and the environment. For instance, Sorin Pierrick, dressed as Monsieur Hulot, a classic character from Jacques Tati's films, positions himself as a needle on a record player, reproducing the skipping needle state during playback. Or is he the real-life skipping needle? Similarly, Choi Kwang-woo bowls on the streets of London, whether he intends to turn the street into a bowling alley or use an alternative method to chase pigeons. As for Zhi Ying, running on the supermarket checkout conveyor belt, is she treating herself as a checkout item or repurposing the conveyor belt as a treadmill? In the mentioned artworks, these three artists adopt a proactive approach to intervene in the space. They place behaviors typically occurring in Space A into Space B while cleverly selecting elements that can analogize Space A, creating a dual imitation with mutual reference."

Entering the second section, "Scenarios," artists like Dorian Gaudin, despite constantly adjusting the balance of "Shadan and Sara" in the tilted space, seem to adapt nonchalantly to the challenging environment. Similarly, Chen Wan-jen, embodying Bill on the classic Microsoft XP desktop, or the player persistently tackling the ultimate level without a big boss in the first-person perspective; they all appear involuntarily submissive to the orchestrated scenes, living within a temporal loop. In this context, the "human" as the subject seems relatively passive.

Transitioning from the second section to the third, we encounter Éric Watier's "Low-Profile Works – Homage to Bruegel" and its interactive online version, a collaboration with Zhang Junyi. Derived from Pieter Bruegel's painting "Netherlandish Proverbs" (1559), which interprets Dutch proverbs into visual scenes, Watier's reverse extraction into text (e.g., "biting a pillar," "urinating at the moon," "hitting the wall with one's head") highlights the absurdity pervasive in every detail. Placed strategically in the exhibition, this piece intriguingly echoes both "Behavior" and "Scenarios" and foreshadows the upcoming "Media" section. As the visuals detach, leaving only textual descriptions of actions, it feels like a contemporary play on kuso (absurd humor) or popular phrases. One can imagine viewers crafting sentences for the preceding sections' artworks: descending on a garbage heap, moving a bed into the forest, entering a shower to follow a dog's commands, swiftly changing outfits in different locations, a knight waving a flag at a red light, a black cat running in the studio, catching a falling cup, etc. Originally condensing life experiences into concise, populist sentences for easy dissemination, this logic of generating idioms becomes a source of inspiration for viewers, illustrating the artists performing A actions in B scenes or humorously mimicking A actions while unable to escape the context of A scenes. Furthermore, the viewers' next step might very well involve sharing these sentences paired with images of the artworks on social media!

So, before moving on to the next section, we can't help but ponder: How do we define simulated life? What is life unobscured? We've witnessed that life mostly exists within certain established contexts and correspondences. Therefore, viewers quickly grasp the artist's intent, whether actively breaking frameworks or passively presenting them, by integrating their past experiences while extending them with familiar behavioral patterns. Experience and patterns, both terms imply temporal learning, simulation, and repeated verification, reflecting the accumulation of life, becoming either capital or baggage for future life, right? However, we cannot be certain whether, in the ongoing process of inheriting from oneself, others, and the interaction between people and objects, we are more often stuck in futile repetition of the same language or steadily progressing through iterations. The gaps in the "simulated" life, perhaps, emerge from this very uncertainty.

Finally, we've arrived at the third section, "Media." Stepping into this area, we can almost say that "objects" have replaced humans as the subject of simulation or imitation. Huang Yu-Hsiung's "Blurred Dialogue" utilizes a database of his life conversations with Siri and Google Assistant. The artist feeds this voice-recognized data to GPT-2 and GPT-3, allowing AI to learn and generate another form of everyday dialogue. The photos on the phone, echoing the content's keywords, serve as the background for the conversation. We can speculate that the pre-existing "answers that don't fit the questions" in human-machine dialogue, after voice recognition, might introduce another layer of discrepancy, evolving into a form of quasi-misunderstanding in the realm of AI. Paradoxically, compared to conversations with real people, we seem more inclined to engage with AI, as machines, whether accurate or inaccurate, satisfy our sense of self-importance. As for "Technology Zen," which reflects on a day in the life of a monk continuously tapping a bell, it starts by constraining life to the screen, where messages incessantly pop up and get clicked open. The artist, Shih Shun-Chung, collaborates with Chang Tzu-Chu to form the "Fu Zhong Boys" and performs a live action piece titled "Dry Landscape" — the name itself straightforward, yet the achievement lies not in meditative practice but in the inescapable immersion in instant online communication, symbolized by the raked patterns in the white sand.

I have always been fascinated by the period in the 15th century when the perspective technique had not yet matured. Artists used the element of "windows" to break the boundaries between indoors and outdoors, simultaneously bringing forth a kind of scenery that required no context. In the exhibition, the large-scale "Dry Landscape" stands out with a particular sense of technological solitude. Perhaps this is due to works like "Technology Zen" and Huang Yu-Hsiung's "Blurred Dialogue" and "Failed Perception," which have opened a window into this symbolic garden. Screens have become indispensable in contemporary (and simulated) life, even though they are still a makeshift measure to rationalize things in some way.

The exhibition concludes with Julien Prévieux's "What to Do Next? #2" and "Where Is My (Deep) Intelligence?" The former vividly illustrates how humans, after a certain invention, create corresponding gestures (such as using the index finger to slide for unlocking a phone or the pinch motion for zooming). The latter, like a warning before AI completely takes over life, showcases four performers embodying the behaviors, negotiation skills, understanding of humor, and evolutionary processes of machine learning in humans. These abstract and exaggerated actions bring about a certain sense of humor, yet we cannot be certain if everyone will find it amusing in the end.

Pierrick Sorin's "Awakening," the first artwork in the exhibition 'Simulacra of Real Life,' caught the attention of astute viewers as it is not only the inaugural piece but also the earliest in terms of creation, dating back to 1988. The content of this video is simple: it repeatedly shows the artist Huyghe, with sleepy eyes, solemnly declaring, "Tonight, I really need to go to bed early" because he's "really tired" and "can't go on like this." In about five minutes, we witness him falling into the same loop every day. The original title, Les Réveils, is a pun that refers to both the alarm clock that wakes him up in the morning and the act of getting up; the former is the mechanical operation of an object, repeatedly and precisely indicating the time, while the latter reflects the constrained individual, displaying the will to get up but resisting the reality of going to bed late.

Looking at this artwork in 2023, aside from the humor and absurdity generated by the artist's daily self-portraits, what stands out is the initial scene where the artist explains the filming process. Setting up the camera, calibrating, focusing, turning on the radio, connecting a 1500-watt lamp to a schedule timer, placing a microphone by the bedside as a remote control for the camera—all these low-tech methods seem particularly comical in an era dominated by smartphones. However, it is precisely this visibly cumbersome process that prompts the question: Why go through such complexity to remind oneself of such a simple matter as waking up and going to bed early?"

The same metaphor appears in the final artwork of the exhibition, Julien Prévieux's "Where is My (Deep) Mind?" from 2019. The potential impact brought about by AI might not necessarily be the extensive human effort and resources invested in developing, experimenting, and fine-tuning artificial intelligence machines to the point where they take over jobs. Instead, it raises contemporary questions about human dependence on machines. Why do we need AI assistants to fetch us a joke from a humor database optimized with human assistance—one that we might not even find funny?

"Simulacra of Real Life" unfolds a gradual process, initially centered around humans actively exploring or resisting their relationship with themselves and the environment. As the exhibition progresses, there is a passive shift, allowing the environment to domesticate the individual, ultimately leading to an immersion in the dominance of objects. The entire exhibition portrays a metaphorical simmering of a frog in warm water. Through the transition from anthropomorphism to the anthropomorphization of objects, individuals find it increasingly challenging to resist the gaze and influence of these objects. Eventually, they can only (or willingly) perceive themselves through the mediation of these objects. The belief of remaining human is gradually challenged, revealing a transformation into something else.