Zhengyang and Zhengzhou Huang’s Fire incorporates physical wooden objects, laser scans, a downloadable 3D demo made with a game engine and the website element below.
Turning the concept of Xylophobia on its head the work speculates on the environmental impact of Machine Learning and graphics processing units (GPUs), correlating the amount of data needed to train an AI model with the amount of wood to be burned, both imagining and revealing a hard limit to an often invisible process.
Fire provides a situation where data collection, analysis and consumption ― essential in forming powerful and expensive AI models ― should be carefully considered.
Click and scroll to explore the work below.
Zhengzhou and Zhengyang Huang are a group of artists working with alternative techniques, speculative systems and imaginary avatars. With their practice they try to situate themselves in the current reality layered with data tracking, digital policies, and algorithmic decision making. Throughout their works they hope to navigate through layers of mediation that segment, percolate but may also connect our identity, knowledge and memory. They have shown their most recent series of works about alternative technologies, Air, Water, Fire at Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference at University of Michigan and the Last Online Show at University of California, Los Angeles. Zhengzhou and Zhengyang are currently based in Los Angeles (US).
Back to Xylophobia: Online.