Love in the eyes of Google Lens, Chinhwa He, 2023 MA Graphic Communication Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL

University of the Arts London

UAL Showcase Collections

Digital Desires

wire shaped as a mountain range projected on a wall

This project is a mountain light projection, reflecting on the continuous desire to explore.&quot;This installation is absolutely gorgeous. This physical mountain that gets flattened into a projection asks: What is lost to the digital? What sensual experience have we forfeited? Can it ever be reclaimed?&quot;It perfectly explains the beauty of human desire and that while that’s not going away, technology has the ability to corrupt it, to take hold of it and contort it towards other ends in ways that have been so dangerous across the modern era.&quot; – Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

Lead Me Beyond The Mountain

Large orange figure that is vaguely human shaped. The text 'Hug Me' is in the centre and the sculpture has arms.

Undigitism is a series of fabric sculptures meant to combat loneliness in the digital age.&quot;I am drawn to the strategy the artist took to &quot;combat loneliness&quot; through play and touch. We usually define intimacy as something sexual or romantic but it can also be childlike and innocent. The playfulness of the installation implies a critique of the digital as something corrupting and isolating in its nature.&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

Undigitism

Desiring Machine is a projected animation of a disembodied mouth, which is used as a symbol for our relationship with consumption and desire in the context of the Freudian pleasure principle.&quot;I love that this piece interrogates the relationship between desire and consumption. We often relegate sexuality to the realm of &quot;romance&quot; but it intersects with consumerism and capitalism in some many complex ways. Here desire is aroused but never consummated: not altogether different from the desires engendered from advertisement and media.&quot; – Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

Desiring Machine

Computer generated figure with the words e-Merging Hueman 

e-MERGING HUeMAN questions how the convergence of the digital and physical body blur the dichotomy of identity by merging humans with avatars.&quot;This video is absolutely gorgeous. Watching it, I was confused about what was human and what was artificial – there were times I was proven wrong, and had to shift my understanding of what was true in real-time.&quot;The use of bodies both physical and digital gives the work a quiet eroticism that only adds to the confusion. Its pacing, audio, and style is meditative but becomes increasingly alarming. There&#39;s something sensual about the piece, but also off-putting; the ambiguity made it very provocative.&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

e-Merging Hueman

On the left page, there is a collection of wedding photos and their box. On the right page there is a phone showing a photo album of wedding photos. 

The Physical to Digital is a photo book that reflects on the influence of the ‘continually networked present’ perpetuated by social media on domestic photography. &quot;The Physical to Digital plays with our nostalgia for how we experienced time in the past, and how the speed at which we now consume our memories on the internet has totally transformed our relationship to the present and possibly the future.&quot;I&#39;m not saying the past was better, or whether digital or physical media is better or worse, just that it&#39;s so important to map out that the same image taken in one context feels and looks different in another context and that changes how it shapes our identities.&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

The Physical to Digital

The artist is crouching next to the sculpture and using the laptop within it.

Not There Yet is a performative sculpture that probes the limits of our tendency to perceive aliveness in technological artefacts. &quot;This algorithmically, technically and aesthetically impressive piece plays with our tendency to anthropomorphize digital entities and hints at the dangers of &quot;falling for it&quot;.&quot;When paused, it looks like a piece of housing equipment that someone left on the side of the road, but as soon as it starts to have just a little bit of motion, you instantly feel like it&#39;s something organic and alive. It’s a great example of how quickly we are willing to assign life to the lifeless and what that impact will be in terms of the love we&#39;re willing to give and and receive.&quot; – Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

Not There Yet

Across the Screen Time is a virtual space inviting visitors to study and play with time.&quot;Intimacy often refers to touch and the body. But there’s also the concept of time and spending it with other people. The internet has transformed our relationship with time: everything is simultaneously moving 1000 times faster while not moving at all.&quot;I was impressed by the overlapping of subjectivity that this project was able to explore. ‘How long is your one minute?’ is such a playful invitation: if your one minute is not the same as my one minute, how could we possibly connect? Maybe our one minutes are the same. Maybe we can spend that one minute together.&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

Across the Screen Time

Two men in black stand facing each other with their hands connected

Human Safari is a staged photography series exploring how virtual social interaction turns us into role players.&quot;The images in this project are so striking – I don&#39;t even really know how these photographs were taken. There is a feeling of the folks being lost, or not really there. Something about the space feels charged, maybe dangerous. Are they forever alone, even together?&quot;It&#39;s become cliche to say that &#39;technology will save us&#39;. I&#39;m starting to think intimacy will save us. How are technological advances going to make us reflect more on what it means to be human?&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

Human Safari

Photograph of an illustration from a book about obstetrics + AI image of an insect, pink and white on black + AI abstract three white spikes on grey.

LAMELLA:// is an artistic research project that aims to explore our relationship with technologies and the narratives they construct.&quot;This work reflects the ambiguity of where technology fits into our future and more importantly, our present. It merges old and new media and confuses the boundary of where one ends and the other begins, and the way that these traditions build on top of each other.&quot;It very poetically draws on the theory of biology and its real experience, filtering it through AI generators to blur the physical and digital. It almost seems like a recording of human beings from a time that is way in the future – maybe one we are no longer part of.&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

LAMELLA://

Screenshot of the blurred movements of a pink cell form

This project challenges perceptions of artificial and human intelligence, becoming its own simulated science experiment.&quot;The way that technology situates our body into these networks of hyper presence across the entire globe is totally abstracting our sense of self to be beyond the local and beyond.&quot;This project challenges our perception of biology and humanness, confusing the boundary of our bodies. What impact will that have on our relationship to ourselves and others?&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

Small steps towards a complete imitation

A poem with the words saying 'you can only see the dark' scattered in a digital typeface across a black screen.

orbit is a collection of concrete poems written with code.&quot;I was so impressed by the intersection of poetry and technology; I&#39;ve never seen anything that played with the construction of words through a digital interface.&quot;The power dynamics change in an instant depending on the speed and construction of words: &#39;u see me in the dark&#39; suggests intimacy, &#39;u can only see the dark&#39; suggests danger. The digital context of the work highlights our shifting identities in digital worlds and how quickly our identities and relationships can transform. There is also the suggestion of how these digital worlds, while appearing &#39;flexible&#39; reinforce existing power structures.&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

orbit

These are 3d printed cobalt blue stained parian porcelain that experiments with over-firing vitrification

NNN is a human printer that explores the intersection between machine-made and hand-made.&quot;This project asks what it means to merge the digital and physical. I thought it was really gorgeous to approach it through such a physical medium that is not associated with technology.&quot;I love the playfulness of interfering with 3D-printed and algorithmically created physical objects to produce this serendipitous, uncontrolled end result. It&#39;s such a beautiful metaphor for this idea that there can be beauty in that friction and subversion.There are perhaps elements of control; we&#39;re still here, we have to make sure we don&#39;t forget that.&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

NNN: Human Printer

A collage of digital images of bodies with most of their heads cropped out.

This project is an installation consisting of images and direct quotes and fragments of myths, literature, philosophy, religion and politics about women from Ancient Greece to the Victorians.&quot;The striking quality of this piece is the &#39;saturation&#39;: an endless sea of images and references of &#39;beauty&#39; across millennia.&quot;Our bodies don&#39;t fit these ideas of beauty that saturate the digital world. While it often seems like we want to sacrifice the body in this digital world, we forget that it&#39;s the focal point of intimacy, both in sexual and platonic relationship. What does it mean to touch in a digital or robotic world?&quot;– Adam Cole, Media Artist and AI Researcher

Beauty is the Promise of Happiness

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