training camp
A solo show with Rebecca Forstater{Training_camp} examines the creation of public memory in the current AI-fueled rat race through the lens of pop-culture history.
Focusing on Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake's Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy, Forstater utilized the materiality of emerging AI software to make this installation, asking the training models to contextualize the past given the algorithm's present pool of data. The narrative of this Super Bowl performance, an event deeply intertwined with race, gender, and politics, is a case study of biased ideologies embedded in our digital social consciousness. The outcomes of the objects and videos visualize peculiar amalgamations, riddled with errors, and reveal fleeting instances of progress entangled with societal mistakes, shapeshifting into new iterations.This body of work was created digitally, designed either through user-friendly AI models and AI models still in testing-phase during 2022-23. Each object exists in both digital and physical forms. Existing first as .png, .mp4, .wav, and .stl files that then find physical form to inhabit this room as decals, TV screens playing videos, and 3D prints. These objects echo the perpetual circulation and transformation of data and society, both on and offline, each informing the other.Rebecca Forstater, Spartanburg SC: “My creative practice and research consider the production of contemporary histories within digital landscapes. I explore how collective memory is shaped through pop-culture banality, online community myth-making, and artificial transformation. I present my work through an aesthetic of lo-fi deepfake performances, blending analog methodologies with rehashed digital videos reminiscent of half-remembered internet memes. These exchanges, both in real life and in my work, shift between fact, fiction, reality, virtuality, utopia, dystopia, aspirations, nightmares, fantasy, and algorithmic hallucinations as they circulate through the digital experience. Moments of believability in my work are interjected with absurdity and humor, converging sentimentality and fear to examine sociocultural conditions.”
