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EVENT DESCRIPTION
From invisible presence, glowing lights, fading shadows, translucent shapes, to lifelike forms, the specter manifests itself as various existences. Specters may come from a belief in animism, a hallucination of mind, a speculation of otherworlds, an inhabitation of past lives, or even a superimposition through technology. Whether falsified or not, the specter is one of the oldest collective experiences throughout human history. The specter paves the way for fictionalized yet realistic imaginations of the unknown.
Luke Casey’s solo exhibition, SPECTERS depicts a hallucinative, uncanny journey traversing the universes of nature, spirituality, and technology through photography and video artworks. The audience is invited to float in and out of worlds built by Casey, immerse themselves in the frontier of the imaginary, the reality and its hybrid, constantly shifting in between.
Drawing from fragments of childhood, Casey’s lens-based artworks revisit his abject fantasies and memories, like haunted encounters in the basement of his old home and episodes of brutal violence experienced by a friend in his old neighborhood. With the assistance of an artificial neural network, Casey communicates these eerie memories with technology and reembodies them realistically in analog still and moving images. The abstract shapes or bodily forms simulated by artificial intelligence do not just reflect his personal history and subconsciousness, but also illustrate how artificial intelligence interprets the collective vision of specters projected by humans.
The algorithmically intervened environment and movement in the artworks are imbued with a sense of shared reality, which restores a long-lost communal imagination of the (para)normal and (super)nature disavowed by science. Deep diving into the childlike and dreamlike world co-created by Casey and the computer, the audience is redirected to a bygone era of innocence. SPECTERS interrogates and challenges the credibility and validity of the alleged “truth” in the virtual world.
