Syntheticho(Am I: 0.00)
Recognition used to be a game of two humans throwing a ball back and forth. Now you throw the ball toward a language model, and a force throws it back— but where does that returning force come from? Is what comes back a ball, or just the idea of "catching a ball thrown back"— Syntheticho calls this returned feeling a "hollowed-out synthetic thing": an experience of being seen— synthesized, performed, interactive— produced by a system. Neither illusion nor fully real, yet it takes hold in human experience.
Yiran Jiao (Heki)
Yiran Jiao(Heki) is an artist and creative technologist completing an MFA in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice repeatedly externalises an inner human experience into a perceptible system; these systems depend on the viewer's attention and intervention to occur and change, and are completed only through the viewer's interaction — rebuilt and observed through technical means so that the audience can bodily experience, understand, and affect them. Her current research concerns the sense of being recognised that people receive before large language models, when recognition as an experiential effect can be produced independently of the real other it once depended on.
