‘The Ancestors’ is an anthropological portrait of an aboriginal elder with a facial tattoo in Taiwan. Since the colonial government during the Japanese rule banned this tradition on civilizational grounds, this precious cultural tradition has officially disappeared with the death of the last aboriginal elder to be documented.
Therefore, I used machine learning techniques to integrate the collected images of the tattooed aborigines with other human tissue image databases. This allowed the computer program to automatically create the virtual digital aboriginal people it imagined. This is an attempt to allow these extinct aboriginal cultures to continue to exist in different forms and spaces. The work is also minted on the Tezos blockchain and stored in a decentralized way for permanent preservation.
LAI Tsung-Yun (b. 1988), a digital artist and the organiser of Lacking Sound Festival, Taiwan. Sound and image productions are the first step in his artistic career. He explores the audio mixer’s feedback noise and the environmental sound, and fulfils performances which combine audio and visual. LAI’s video works are based on folk religious rituals and AI art, which chain the mixed noises and oversampling test tones altogether, providing listeners a profound dip into the enigmatic soundscape. Lai Tsung-Yun has curated Lacking Sound Festival since 2013, which is Taiwan’s most renowned sound art performance festival. Lacking Sound Festival has organised over a hundred different sound art performances since 2007. The Festival promotes sound art events in Taiwan and actively works with sound artist groups from abroad.