Artist Statement

June 9 – August 21, Santa Mònica Art Centre, from the Beep Collection.. Public Event.

Keywords: virtual reality art, data visualization

Our fingerprints in the vast universe of data can be duplicated, transferred and mutated. Removing is much harder than putting a piece of paper in a shredder, an invention of more than a hundred years ago. Photos, videos, geotags or simple texts that live on social media platforms as a virtual presence of digitized human memories strengthen the power of computing and machine analysis while taking control of us.

When we try to preserve or erase our own stories in the digital landscape, do we still have the authorship? Are our stories in a permanent change of meaning and representation?

Repository is a virtual reality experience created around the issue of authorship and forgetting data. Build a world of moving data by merging the structure of a server farm (a place where data is physically stored) with a paper shredder (a machine that deconstructs data). Repository is the gradual transformation of a surreal bank that stores memories securely in a space full of floating chunks of letters and characters through the coupling and fragmentation of different conversations taken from Twitter posts in 2019. Its non-linear narrative, interactive experimental sound and surreal aesthetics provide a conceptualization of an alternative model of human-machine interaction, and question whether we have a right to be forgotten and at the same time whether we have a right to be remembered. https://www.zhangweidi.com/repository

• Weidi Zhang is an artist and researcher dedicated to multimedia art living in Los Angeles. Currently, his research and artistic practices focus on investigating a speculative assemblage: interactive visualization based on images and data of a human-machine reality in the context of data visualization, the design of responsive intelligence systems and immersive media. His works have been presented around the world: SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Best In Show, ISEA, Times Art Museum (China), Japan Media Arts Festival, Lumen Prize (UK), SIGGRAPH ASIA, IEEE VISAP, Planetarium 1 (Russia), Zeiss-Planetarium (Georgia), Society for Arts and Technology (Canada) and others. She is currently a PhD candidate in Media Arts and Technology and a graduate researcher in the Experimental Visualization Laboratory. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Ohio State University. He has a master’s degree in Fine Arts and Technology from the California Institute of the Arts and a degree in Photography and Multimedia from the University of Washington, Seattle. http://www.zhangweidi.com