2024
Multi-channel video installation (custom-software, custom-electronics, wood, 3D printed PLA filament, real-time generated video, sound, acrylic, paper, plastic, photographs, crystal, cigarettes, petrified wood, pill bottles, cardboard, fired clay, imitation ivory, and leather) with 13 channels of audio; duration variable.
“Intentness and songs is a multimedia installation that poetically traces the idiosyncratic rhythms of love, memory, and experiences of time. In this interconnected audiovisual landscape, Young draws on the duration and rhythm of human and generative AI memory recall processes, as the basis for polychromatic sculptures, videos, and a mesmerizing soundscape. Across the gallery floor, hundreds of wooden boards with markings created through a mix of techniques and 3D-printed boards are etched and embedded with collections of vintage cigarette cartons, old watches, and yellowed photographs and papers — fragments excerpted from the lives of the artist and his husband. Each board draws on dates and events of sentimental or cultural significance, referencing images and records amassed from digital calendar listings, newspaper stories, and internet archives of old television shows. Image and language-based generative AI models trained on these datasets digest, recall, and reinterpret it, driving the interconnected audiovisual landscape. Other parts of Young’s nonlinear assemblage of time reveal themselves in glimpses — AI-driven graphics of a back alley or restaurant table, a quartet of voices singing a poem woven into the soundscape, or the contours of nostalgic pieces of technology echoed in the boards and monitors – logging the constellation of data points generated from a lifetime together. Before the emergence of the novel, visual culture was dominated by the database — structured collections of information. This installation embraces multiplicity of form, experience, and storytelling through a return to the database. From this vast cloud of information, various overlapping pathways emerge — a love story between the artist and his husband without beginning nor end; a diaristic record of actions; a mediation on the fears of forgetting and of being forgotten. Just as the generative AI models integrated throughout the installation trawl through databases to generate new narratives, Intentness and songs invites us to explore and wander, charting our new stories in our wake.”
Text by Karen Cheung and Alison Guh, SF MOMA.
Installation views courtesy SF MOMA, photo credit: Don Ross and Tenari Tuatagoloa.