Qingyu Tian

"Plant Hell"

Section MS7, Sam Nightingale

Keywords: ai

This video tells of a speculative future concerning the extinction of plants in a post-human era. In 2083, future generations will not know what a plant is because a large number of plants have become extinct, but no one knows the cause. Since no one knows what these plants looked like, AI was used to restore the images through the literature and fossils. However, in the process of machine learning, the AI generated a "plant hell". A hacker discovered "plant hell" in a bug when he searched for photos of plants. As he travelled through the "plant hell", he saw the crimes of the ancestors (that's us) describing plants as "sinful" so they could legally make money from the earth's resources. Human sentenced the plants to hell for their crimes, so they disappeared from the planet forever.

Artists and scientists have been exploring how visual space can be used as an internal space to help us navigate the external world. With the invention of computer-generated imagery, the eye could collect optical data rather than relying solely on camera shots. Inspired by Harun Farocki's Eye/Machine trilogy, I became interested in how computers (machines) trick the eye into believing things that do not exist in the world. Cinema4D is a computer 3D imagery technology that achieves a realistic visual effect by simulating or tricking the human eyes with computer algorithms. It is a medium that breaks down barriers between the real and the virtual. My work uses Cinema4D to visualise emotions through the overlay of virtual and reality, learning from traditional photography and exploring a computer-based media approach to empathise with the viewer.