Image: Production Sketch (by the artist team, 2023)

Shenzhen’s district of Longgang has transitioned from rural farmland to urban high-tech parks in a few decades, thereby forming a newly industrialized “high-tech corridor” connecting Shenzhen with the new centers and peripheries of the Greater Bay Area. “High Sections / Low Leaps” takes as its starting point the actual and perceived contrasts resulting from fast development. Where big and small leaps are made daily, lands are re-sectioned by wide avenues, high- and low-tech blend. This site-specific installation speculates in sound and image about alternative futures, utilizing artificial intelligence (A.I.) generated content that is trained on, and informed by, site-specific footage captured from fieldwork. Altered and othered recordings of low mechanical noise emissions of high-tech parks are contrasted with the visual A.I.-generated speculations. This surreal sonic world is rendered audible on the one hand as a soundtrack of the four video-walks thorugh the A.I.-generated 3d world, and on the other hand as a multichannel sound piece installed in a tree in front of the exhibition gallery, in the outdoors. The third element of the work constitutes of a series of five more-than-photorealistic A.I.-generated views of details of future urban environments that exhibit urban parks, high-tech buildings, and large-scale public addressing systems, such as megaphones and loudspeaker elements housed in ventilation shafts and on park sculptures. These prints are digitally altered with a dystopian-looking pixelation that challenges the usually “transparent” process of mediation when representing a urban scene through media.

Pictures: by SeeD Shenzhen, 2023


Image: Production Sketch (by the artist team, 2023)