Roundabout

Using tools of video games, artificial intelligence, and digital rendering, Shi Zheng reduces reality into pure logical learnings. The artist removes the traces of human subjectivity from inherently social objects such as newspapers, living spaces, and transportation networks, crafting familiar imagery through the lens of a detached observer. Underlined with heightened senses of absence and presence, the artworks also simulate a tranquil passage of time, yet in a vacuum that is severed from time and space. As if moving around and around a roundabout, the presented realities develop continuously – without fail, change, nor an end.

The From the Film Set of Alphaville series is a collection of digital replicas of the artist’s real-life studio, simulated through computer software. The artist pays tribute to Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Alphaville” in the title, while using the “film set” to metaphorically represent the artist’s own studio environment. The empty chair in the image suggests the owner’s absence and highlights the presence of various devices on the table. Although the screens are not lit up, the hard drive lights reveal the machines’ hidden operations, emphasizing a feeling of “machines in attendance while human beings are unaccounted”.

In the series Hovering at the Convergence of Entrances and Exits which consists of 24 video works, the artist directly uses the coded game as a carrier to nestle metaphors of the virtual world and creative space in the idea of the sandbox. He appropriated the satellite imagery of particular locations that he chose on Google Earth and reconstructed the corresponding virtual scenes in Cities: Skylines. Each video focuses on an architectural scene simulated by the artist, primarily overpasses and highways, indicating variant examples of a single type of industrial infrastructure. The artist aspires to new objectivity with the help of the machine’s eye. In this progressive logical sequence-objects, maps, games, simulations, screens, and then viewers-he reveals the “remote presence” of the architecture while at the same time completing the gradual abstraction of the viewed object.

Frosty Morning is a multi-channel video installation generated by Neural Networks, which are rhythmic structures made by human beings that simulate our brain and nervous systems. After the artist’s research on Machine Learning and Neural Networks, an Artificial Neural Network is trained to “read” the front page of The New York Times from the last 6 years. By imitating the data set, it starts to render the newspaper, generate blurred image, and approach the form of reality, but never realizing the legible content. As a perpetual newspaper generator or a machine trying to predict “the future,” the work seems to reflect the reasonable and overwhelming world in the present.