CURATED BY JENNY CHEN JIAYING

The exhibition is designed as a dichotomous structure. Inspired by the typical ‘swipe right to like, swipe left to dislike’ mechanism, it starts with a virtual online dating app that leads the audience to two different spaces. It is a metaphor for our manipulated emotions and speaks about romantic online relationships through an intertextual narrative. These romantic relationships have been perceived as ‘natural’ interactions without being in the same physical space, groundless affection, and even remote performances of sexual desire. For millennials, the internet provides more freedom for expressing their instinctual egos while the physical world and people seem to be distant. These subtle emotions connect to our ‘inner-selves’ are spread across the fiber optic network ubiquitously, raising the question that if our connection to the virtual domain means the detachment to the real world. Simultaneously, the layout of the exhibition is a spatial representation of our online behavior, meaning that every time one chooses to like or dislike, click or unclick, the algorithm generates the user’s data packet and direct the online route through the privacy permissions. We have literally no authentic choice among the numerous options. By ‘collaborative filtering’ and ‘autocomplete’ function (e.g. ‘Recommended for you’ on Amazon, ‘Who to Follow’ on Twitter, and ‘Topic you might like’ on Quora), network science follows its default logic: ‘Birds of a feather flock together.’ It generates social bubbles, which leads to discourse polarization, the proliferation of identity politics, and deeper divisions of our cultural and political landscape.

Now connect to the Internet, type in ‘AI’ and searched for ‘Love’, I see people shouting, singing, mourning, feeling, fantasizing, and contemplating in struggles about gaining and losing love. It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.¹ With regard to Love and AI, we experience the featured artists’ tales 1through the spectrum of their works, and rethink the emotional and technological circumstances of our time.

¹Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali