LAWKI (Life As We Know It)-NOW
In this spatial installation by ARK, a network of unsupervised algorithms curate countless online videos into new narratives. Through this compositional gesture, today’s story is broadcast in sound and vision, in which reality merges with the techno-imaginative. ‘LAWKI–NOW’ in the Achurch in Groningen is a life-size installation in five parts in which the visitor can wander. The work raises questions: Does artificial intelligence work for or against us? Is the truth of the internet taking over our reality? Are we still in control of our imagination?
Through thousands of pixels, an algorithm pours online videos over the visitor, in combination with an artificial intelligence-driven, immersive sound composition, inspired by cori spezzati, a 16th-century Italian choral singing technique. Together with the audio-visual experience, the choir’s lyrics take the visitor into a story about our lives today: Life As We Know It. A world that never seems the same and in which the internet has become a new reality that overshadows us and shows us who we have become.
‘LAWKI–NOW’ shows images that anyone can find on the internet. Individual fragments from all over the world are forged into a new story as you walk through the installation, a story about a new daily reality in which we are flooded with information.
Can we still understand the internet?
500 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Two billion active users watch more than a billion hours of videos every day: we have arrived in an information age where the amount of data on the internet is beyond our grasp. ‘LAWKI–NOW’ turns the church into an audio-visual and interactive tool, wondering how a computer could help us understand this kind of huge amount of data by turning it into a new story for us.
Cori spezzati uses the architecture of the church to create a three-dimensional stereo sound.
The music written and sung especially for ‘LAWKI–NOW’ nestles in the walls and architecture of the historic Achurch. The space of the church itself becomes an instrument, whose impressive acoustics provide a moving experience.
Are we still in control of our imagination?
‘LAWKI–NOW’ is not a video with a play button, but a living and algorithmically controlled live organism that is constantly changing under the influence of the presence and movements of the audience. By moving between the screens, the visitor creates new compositions himself. In this ‘walk of wonder’, the spectator is not only a consumer of the spectacle, but also part of the process and the result.
The title ‘LAWKI’ is an acronym of ‘Life As We Know It’, and it elaborates on a short film that the collective ARK made for the Netherlands Film Festival in September 2020.
Commissioned by: Noorderlicht and MU Hybrid Art Space
ARK = Federico Campagna (IT), Louis Braddock Clarke (GB), Roosje Klap (NL), Arran Lyon (GB), Senka Milutonovic (RS), Teoniki Rozynek (PL), Valentin Vogelmann (DE) and Zuzanna Zgierska (PL)
