- Melodie Shi
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I am a London-based multidisciplinary creative with a focus on the social impressions created by the interplay between materiality and digital culture.
I have developed a theory-led practice that forms a critical approach to humanity’s future.
It all began with a letter from the year 2050, written by a daughter who had lived alongside an AI digital twin since birth. Digitally stored personal histories are becoming ever more entangled with the concept of one’s self-understanding; blurring the lines between physically and digitally constructed selfhood. Instigating a series of practical and theoretical research into contemporary selfhood understanding, AI companionship, digital tonality, immaterial digital personal histories, intuitive walking, and maps.
The short film features my walk with an AI digital twin’s voice, traversing various non-spaces through digital and physical interplays. It aims to meditate on a critical distance in the age of digitally manufactured instant gratification.
In a world of biomedical advancement in 2070, the choice to resume one’s physicality at the optimum state of one's bodily existence would be obtainable for most of the population. Therefore, prolonging the longevity of lives in society leads to an overpopulated planet at its scarce. The renewed interpretations of death and sedated euthanasia services had been introduced while emphasising the gratification and fulfilment of the living. Once a luxury for the idle elites to seek an intelligible purpose in life, the soul search machine is now accessible through the nation’s health care system for the mass suffering of decadal crises.
The production of this photo shoot was a scene from this speculative story on the extended lifespan and the morality of immortality.
Touches distinguish reality from fantasticality, checking the spectrum of a dreamer’s corporeality. Act to bridge the conscious and subconscious minds, acknowledging the dual nature of our existence.
From a found family photograph to the imprinted silhouette of ropes on the cement floor;
Through experiments on instinctual visualisation, the surface notions could all be attributed to the known familiarities stored in memories.
The zine was a product of my practice-based research on chance through recalled semantic memories categorised as visual auto-ethnography. It includes snapshots of my habitual, unintended exercise to capture 2D visuals across 2019–2021.