"The water is the fish’s element:
Leave her but there, and she is well content."
by John Bunyan
Aspects of Her Life
2017, 2020, 2022
Electronics, glass, ink, creative coding, computer vision
Dimensions variable
Who shares the authorship of artwork in the age of converging computational and biological systems? How does today’s entanglement of machine and wetware challenge us to reconsider an agency that is beyond human? In Aspects of Her Life (2017, 2020, 2022), a Siamese fighting fish was placed in a machine that tracked her life trajectory and turned it into paintings and digital sculptures. But the fish, with such keen vision, started to notice the moving paintbrushes and follow their movement, so an unexpected feedback loop of mutual gaze formed. Might this suggest the power of a subject of surveillance to cast the gaze back? From this encounter emerges a reconsideration of the boundaries between control, communication, collaboration, and co-creation.
Aspects of Her Life (2017, 2020, 2022) is a piece of Frank Cong’s Authorship (2017 - ongoing) series. See other pieces of this series:
The Co-Author (2017, 2020)
Untitled (Fruit-fly Yeast) (2022 - ongoing)
Aspects of Her Life (2022), exhibition setup at Liu Haisu Museum, photograph by Frank Cong
Aspects of Her Life (2022), documentation video
Aspects of Her Life (2022), the painting machine, photograph by Damien Zhang
Poetic Data
Aspects of Her Life (2017), a 7-day (60 minutes per day) recording of the guppy’s trajectory
The dance of the fish is recorded as real-time data. And the system interprets the data in multiple ways to create varios aesthetic experiences for us to approach a different perception.
Aspects of Her Life (2022), machine-assisted paintings, 7 minutes * 21 days, photograph by Zihao Ouyang
