With the booming technology of communication, multimedia and audiovisual occupy people’s vision through streaming media in which various genres of self-media privatize image files of the poor image, further propelling the creative works of video content towards privatization.
Of all the genres tutorial videos have become one of the significant ways of learning for people. Schools and institutions no longer circumscribe spaces for learning, and people can have technologies difficult for self-learners such as AI (artificial intelligence) at their disposal.
The introduction of AI technology opens up a new chapter in optimization for photos. AI learning takes place between millions of photos before and after adding noise, or between different resolutions of the same photo, enabling a better result in noise reduction and image super-resolution.
In 1990, the spacecraft Voyager 1 on the verge of the solar system photographed the Pale Blue Dot photo in the direction towards Earth upon the astronomer Carl Sagan’s request. In this photo filled with noise, Earth occupies merely a white dot in 0.12 pixels, barely noticeable, as if easily erasable as part of the noise.
“Consider again at that dot,” Carl Sagan depicts the photo with a poetic revelation that evinces the humble existence of humans and the delusion of human privilege in the universe. This shiny, tiny blue dot challenges such delusion and unravels the human perception of distance extended by scientific images.
“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love…lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe…”
A large amount of training data may reduce the impact of exceptions in AI models, thus strengthening the adaptability (robustness) of the AI models. However, the AI noise reduction model, trained under this seemingly reasonable logic, perceives Earth in the Pale Blue Dot photo as noise and erases it with the rest of the photo noises – are the 12 new resolutions in the AI super-resolution model based on a universe without us and Earth?
I imitate the style and method of the popular online tutorials in the setting and filming, where the tutor sits behind a desk with editing equipment in a colorful, atmospheric background. The tutor demonstrates the AI image editing software with the Pale Blue Dot photo as teaching materials. While the tutor explains the steps in handling noise reduction and super-resolution and eventually produces a high-quality Pale Blue Dot photo, Carl Sagan’s speech interpolates through the tutorial. In the tutorial video, it employs the stock photos and video clips used in self-media. In the exhibition site, the tutorial video is matched with lighting and a kinetic installation of laser grids, bridging the imagination of traveling interstellar space with the metaphor of the universe perceived in resolution.
Born in 1995, currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. Earning her master’s degree in new media art from TNUA. Having won the HONORARY MENTION AWARD of Ars Electronica Prix 2023, she also has received awards of NEXT ART TAINAN(2020), NANYING AWARDS (2018), SANCF AWARD (2017). Zi-Yin CHEN wanders between perception and science. Her artworks are a contemplation of how similarity and disparity of the two may influence human perception of reality. Focusing on video and installation. Her work frequently uses data provided by the ISS, astrological , scientific images as well as her imagination of unknown universe.
