Lev Kaya is a Turkish-[so called]Australian f-slur artist who primarily works from a laptop between unceded Barramattagal and Wallumedegal land, experimenting with emerging technologies and moving image, broadly exploring globalisation and its capacity to twist and fold existences to create both utopian and horrific realities. A primary consideration for his practice is that what is called 'emerging technologies' are often produced explicitly for use by the state in warfare or by private industry for the expansion of surveillance capitalism. A primary compulsion of his practice is to respond to these conditions in inventive and ways that appropriate technologies intended for subjugation.
FLASH WARNING.
GLITCH GAGA,
(2021) is a 1080x1920 video intended for projection on a 225x400mm projection glass screen suspended in the centre of a dark spacious room. Taking the appearance of a damaged hologram, the video depicts a glitched, distorted, janky, and haphazard rendering of Lady Gaga composed of images from disparate sources. It's deformity is evidently because of its glitched-ness, crunched up by the cyber, spat out as a kind of alloyed version of who we think is Lady Gaga. The hologram's speech is composed of statements from Legacy Russell's 'Glitch Feminism A Manifesto' turned into audio through text-to-speech software and samples from Lady Gaga interviews. The video itself employs a 3D face reconstruction algorithm and photogrammetric modelling to make multiple models of the subjects face before using face tracking to animate them. It speaks to the kind of haphazard sewing together of vague myths, tweets, images, music, and other digital artefacts that allows for the construction of fantasy. An agglomerative collage of simulacrum and cyber-memories. A fantasy that forms within fibre-optic cables.
In the context of my broader practice, Glitch Gaga implicitly continues to push my broader compulsion to experiment with emerging technologies whilst being reflexive of their original intention. Where biometric face recognition has become an apparatus of surveillance and state security, face tracking allows me to digitally embody fantasy. Where 3D face reconstruction is primarily a forensic technology, its use here is visualise the fabrication of fantasy.
GLITCH GAGA,
(2021) is a 1080x1920 video intended for projection on a 225x400mm projection glass screen suspended in the centre of a dark spacious room. Taking the appearance of a damaged hologram, the video depicts a glitched, distorted, janky, and haphazard rendering of Lady Gaga composed of images from disparate sources. It's deformity is evidently because of its glitched-ness, crunched up by the cyber, spat out as a kind of alloyed version of who we think is Lady Gaga. The hologram's speech is composed of statements from Legacy Russell's 'Glitch Feminism A Manifesto' turned into audio through text-to-speech software and samples from Lady Gaga interviews. The video itself employs a 3D face reconstruction algorithm and photogrammetric modelling to make multiple models of the subjects face before using face tracking to animate them. It speaks to the kind of haphazard sewing together of vague myths, tweets, images, music, and other digital artefacts that allows for the construction of fantasy. An agglomerative collage of simulacrum and cyber-memories. A fantasy that forms within fibre-optic cables.
In the context of my broader practice, Glitch Gaga implicitly continues to push my broader compulsion to experiment with emerging technologies whilst being reflexive of their original intention. Where biometric face recognition has become an apparatus of surveillance and state security, face tracking allows me to digitally embody fantasy. Where 3D face reconstruction is primarily a forensic technology, its use here is visualise the fabrication of fantasy.
