the future belongs to g-g-ghosts

It is becoming increasingly challenging to find affordable locations for creating, exhibiting, and sharing art due to rampant gentrification and urban renewal worldwide. As a result, many independent art venues are being forced to relocate or close, often replaced by upscale boutiques, eateries, residential units, or offices. With our cities increasingly dominated by privatised areas reserved for paying customers, how do we resist the commodification of space under capitalism? Is it too late to lament the disappearance of creative hubs in our communities?

Adam Hsieh’s AI-generated video project, the future belongs to g-g-ghosts, embarks on an artistic inquiry into the destabilising spatial-cultural landscape driven by private land ownership. It derives from an empirical survey of Good Grief Studios, an artist-run space in Nipaluna/Hobart, Australia, which is at risk of displacement due to the landowner’s upcoming development plans. The uncertainty of its future is deeply embedded in the present. The artwork addresses this ongoing insecurity and anxiety by introducing a more-than-human perspective—ghost vision—that transcends our perceptions beyond physical bodies and the boundaries of time and space, suggesting new ways of seeing ourselves and our surroundings.

Utilising a custom AI fine-tuned with 3D scanning data from the site, Hsieh creates a visual and audio-guided meditation experience to submerge spectators in a post-human image world, projecting them into the future and speculating on a time when we might all return as ghosts haunting the ruins of former art studios. More-than-humans, however, may envision their surroundings differently from humans. The morphing and distorting images hallucinated by AI shift our focus from mere representation to a more complex, fluid interpretation of the place. Guided by the ambient soundscape and spoken words, spectators can initiate a dreamlike, multi-sensory excursion and engage in an immersive, embodied place-making process with generative AI, further interrogating the entanglement between physical-digital space and the economic, social, and political forces that shape it.

CREDITS
Adam Hsieh (director/production)

MEDIUM
Digital video, 1080p, colour, with stereo sound

DURATION
4 minutes & 14 seconds

EXHIBITION
GOOD GRIEF TURNS 5 (2024). Good Grief Studios, Nipaluna/Hobart, Australia. 14 Jun 2024.