Pronouncing how our reality is being mediated and profoundly changed by digital technologies, Event Modeling consists of two works AI Fossil and #dump. Among the content pushed by his own social media algorithms, artist Ziyang Wu selected news and social events and fed their titles into the image generating Artificial Intelligence Dream fields 3D. For AI Fossil, the AI created 3D models from those texts, as if fossilizing the filter-bubble reality Wu lives in. In a post-apocalyptic factory scene, visitors can approach the scattered AI fossils to trigger pop-up banners of the original sources and event titles. The work reveals how textual stories can be fragmented and re-interpreted into virtual objects of sarcasm, grandiosity, obscenity, and obscurity, as processed and apprehended by AI. Developed in collaboration with artist Mark Ramos, #dump is a live simulated online environment, based on the 3D models built for AI Fossil. Ramos and Wu tagged the 3D models with matching keywords from the book Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary (Edited by The Keywords Project, Oxford University Press, 2018). Once these keywords are found in new tweets, in real time, #dump will dump the relevant 3D models into the virtual landscape of a salt mine. Hinting at activities of extraction and expansion, the 3D models will continue to ‘landfill’ the landscape, a metaphor of how digital technology will colonize every facet of our lives.
