Multidisciplinary artist Shuang Li weaves together stock videofootage into shiny synthetic textures, illuminating the flattened Vocaloid feeling of Osheyack’s amazing ‘Still’.
‘Still’ is the impressive centrepiece of Osheyack’s mostcurrent album for SVBKVLT, Intimate Publics, a haunting sonic assemblage of deep ambient rumble and the resonant ricochet of stock samples raised from Yamaha’s Vocaloid softwareapplication, a singing voice synthesizer often utilized to breathe life into Japanese virtual idols. Initially madeup to accompany multidisciplinary artist Shuang Li’s video work ‘How Come An Image,’ which itself supplied the centrepiece to her solo exhibit at Peres Projects, Nobody’s Home, the track layers superlatives like ‘will you still care for me?,’ ‘I’m close to you’ and ‘I desire someone to love,’ slurring the sense-making function of the Vocaloid’s stock expressions, making them muddled. By working nearly totally with stock expressions, Osheyack enhances the raw feeling of the basic expressions and the incredible ecstasy of the Vocaloid’s shipment while subversively exposing the artificial nature of such a action, gesturing towards a maker intimacy indecipherable to those doingnothave the right algorithm. In an extension of their partnership, Shuang Li accomplishes the verysame impact with stock videofootage in her music video for the track, weaving together shiny vignettes perfectly into an identifiably synthetic narrative.
The ease of which it is possible to gainaccessto technologically-generated feeling, as well as how precarious such a procedure is, is checkedout in the work’s monologue, which the artist brings over from ‘How Come An Image.’ That work checkedout the entropic impacts of the unlimited scroll, with a series of images replicated in ruthless series, virtual fingers determining pace and instructions, each slowly breakingdown and losing pixels with each cycle, ultimately breakingdown into cherry blooms. Li’s monologue shows on this representation of the death of the image in the age of social media, telling this experience from the pointofview of the image itself. “It all begun from the centre of all the attention. When I utilized to stop time and bring back the dead,” it remembers. “But time has neverever been an ally. It is infact my stalker.” The blink of a phantom cursor provides the impression of the autocorrect function of some hidden word processor, or generative language designs like GPT-3, allatonce financing the image’s words a diaristic quality while gesturing towards the nature of their synthesis, an synthetic system coming to terms with its own decay. As Li’s picked stock images mix into one another, the raised nonsensicality of their pairing exposes itself: helicopters melting into sea turtles, milk into barbed wire.
“If you can go back to December 2019 would you do anything inadifferentway,” the image presents, hypothesizing on its own presence pre-pandemic. “I think I still will leave, however this time I won’t appearance back.” Glancing back to a time priorto the platform large expansion of recommended social media material, priorto the Instagram algorithm was thoughtabout essential sufficient to discover its method onto daytime talk reveals and the Kardashians’ primary feeds, Shuang Li thinksabout what it indicates for an image to passaway in an period when all images appear infinite and longlasting. With this work’s monologue, the idea is that the flattening of whatever into material postures as much of a issue to the image as it does it its audience, this existential stressandanxiety personified in this image’s passingaway words. “All the debilitating feelings appear so far like theotherday,” the image confesses. “Now I simply live through stock images, one after another, playing Russian liveroulette faster and quicker, till I wear’t exist.” Like Osheyack’s rushing of artificial feeling through superimposition, the adjustment of stock images over the course of the video’s period activates a likewise harmful desire in the image, an desire which it eventually comprehends as self-reflexive.
“A spike through the heart doesn’t do a thing, so I got it and stabbed throughout my stalker’s,” the image exposes. “Now I live in a vacuum where time doesn’t exist. But I forgot to discuss, time and me are just