Lov-Lov (2018- ) is an absurd but poetic interdisciplinary project that explores the meaning and significance of humans in the age of artificial intelligence. As humanity pays for our growing greed and never-ending desires, morality is continually challenged and evaded, resulting in our collective ignorance and denial.
Lov-Lov Shop solo exhibition:
May 25-July 13.2019 @de Sarthe Gallery Hong Kong
Technological advancement continues unabated under the guise of efficiency and convenience. The new era of Automation Technology – namely artificial intelligence (AI) – is imbued with potential while raising unprecedented concerns. The best chess players in the world are no longer human beings, and Lin’s Lov-Lov Shop asks: “What if the best lovers and life partners were also no longer human?” The 6-channel video You Need To Be Careful With Me: I Fall In Love And I Fall In Love Forever (2019) simulates an engaging commercial television advertisement. Using appropriated footage and images from movies and the internet in combination with dynamic commercial language, the artist introduces the audience to an all-new AI lover. While the video resembles a public service announcement, the world it presents appears dystopian. The seemingly affectionate title is suggestive of a double entendre as the word “forever” may be implying non-human. In Lov-Lov’s world, consumers can freely download the appearance, voice, behavior, memory, wisdom, and even humor of any human in history, such that they may maximize their happiness and satisfaction.
Taking over half the space, Lov-Lov Shop (2019) is an advertising campaign that promotes different models of ideal companions using exaggerated catchphrases. Expanding beyond romantic partners, the triptych Unconditional Love and Companionship On Call (2019) showcases a society constructed entirely of AI and customized based on Lov-Lov’s data analysis of the user’s upbringing and need for relationships and social validation. In this society, humans live unburdened by relationships as the AI takes into account our desires for social harmony, intimacy, and a sense of belonging. AI incorporates these needs into a completely closed and manageable system, eliminating the possibility for unwanted conflict and drama. Through this series, Lin asks desperately: “In a world perfect as such, will humans willingly terminate their relationships with other human beings (and even all other natural life) and live happily ever after in an artificial simulation?”
6 Screen Video work: "You Need to be Careful with Me, I fall in Love and I Fall in Love Forever"
starts with a tempting commercial advertisement introducing a new AI lover to an eager audience. Using images and footage appropriated from movies with text overlays, it presents a dystopian world where direct human interactions can be replaced by ordering a personalized robot tailored to meet our intimacy and emotional needs, thus altering our fundamental beliefs about the role of humans in human society.
The physical appearance of these robots is no different from that of human beings. They will be fabricated to each customer’s exact desires and the robot’s inner character is created from an extremely comprehensive database of interests, personalities, and quirks; the datasets of internal and external characteristics include profiles of every living or deceased person known to human history. Customers can freely download any individual’s characters, appearance, voice, habits, memory, thinking ability, and moral perspective. The amazing accuracy and precision, like our ever-improving camera pixels, has been developed and implemented like never before. In the world of Lov-Lov, human beings can purchase their ideal emotional partner and romantic relationship in one simple financial transaction. In essence, they purchase the most evasive of human freedoms: freedom from other people, with their weaknesses, preferences, and—before Lov-Lov—uncompromising independence. Hence, at this point, humans are empowered as absolute individual dictators of their personal experiences, reality, and community. AI lovers allow anyone to escape the threat of insecurities and take full control over their own lives and interpersonal relationships. With this newfound power, human beings will be able to constantly adjust and reset their rights and needs thus maximizing self-occupation and their happiness.
In this imagined near future, any individual’s personality, unique consciousness, and wisdom can be converted into bits, downloaded, copied, rewritten, and then optimized in the form of a Lov-Lov robot. Once these customized, technology-driven relationships are widely accepted in society, not only will they completely eliminate people’s dependence on other human beings and interpersonal relationships, but subvert our definitions of identity, emotions, community, and morality. Paradoxically, the ultimate continual expansion of human’s desire for “taking” with diminishing interest in “giving” will eventually become a reality for everyone, a terrifying prospect we need to consider before it’s too late.
The absurdity of this notion is amplified in Lin’s Lov-Lov pharmacy series We Have Solutions (2019). This corresponding series advertises a medication regime perfect for indolent individuals. If you are too lazy to order an AI companion, all you need is a pill to experience love again and again – it is that simple and easy. Love, trust, friendship, respect, even spirituality, mysteriousness, and confidence – all are attainable, and all you need to do is sit back and enjoy. Is this not the shortcut to altering minds and reality that many long for?
In The Lov-Lov Shop, Customers will be able to customize their Lov-Love robot down to precise details such as their robot’s socioeconomic class, cultural history, preferences, language, accent, age, temperament, appearance, styles of communication, interaction, level of dysfunctionality, and so on.
Going beyond the purchase of a single lover and partner, customers can fabricate their ideal circle of friends, their degree of closeness/solicitousness, their sense of humor, concerns, interests, or sexual orientation.
The shop will also host fabricated surprise birthday parties and other social functions with a near-guaranteed ability to make customers feel exactly the way they want to feel.
Socialization is and will remain a necessary element for people to judge the value of their own existence, identity, and position in society. Lov-Lov’s AI brains will incorporate these coordinates and desires into a completely manageable and closed system to achieve their customer’s social goals minus the pesky perturbances and uncontrollable dramas that arise from real human interaction.
Social needs and group dynamics will no longer based on the requirements of a cooperative society, but on the individual’s selfish desires and goals.In Lov-Lov’s world, people live trouble free and fully-pleased in their relationships as they socialize with intelligent, perceptive, cogent robots that satisfy all their needs for affiliation, intimacy and social integration.
Lov-Lov perfect society will allow anyone to escape the threat of insecurities and take full control over their own lives and interpersonal relationships. With this newfound power, human beings will be able to constantly adjust and reset their rights and needs in their social groups, thus maximizing their happiness.
Second To None (2019) is the slogan for Lin’s 2020 Presidential Election project, in which she encourages voters to opt for a socially responsible AI president.
Lin’s cubic projection installation A New Dawn For America (2019) introduces, for the first time in history, an AI presidential candidate. Cast through five projections atop a single white cube, the video delivers a passionate and detailed speech given by the AI candidate. The candidate tackles the most sensitive and complex of social issues and demonstrates its ability as a future leader with daring vision. While AI surpasses humans in logical reasoning, information processing, and making intelligent decisions, it is also untethered from biological and personality flaws, and incapable of personal scandals and political tyranny. It is the most reliable and trustworthy candidate in terms of fulfilling public service and civil obligations, and it satisfies the selection criteria of most voters.
Installation for 2020 Presidential election campaign for the first AI presidential candidate
Title: You Can Trust Me
Starting from promoting a 2020 AI Presidential election campaign, the whole idea is first to create a socially responsible AI that can replace any human leader in the political sphere, then to eventually replace all representatives, institutions and soft infrastructure of government with robots.
Today, we have confirmed through various experiments that the machine can think; cogitation is no longer a special talent unique to the human brain. The processing of information and action steps of the machine depends on its computing power, calculating the gains and losses by calculation.
Can humans coexist indeed peacefully with the hyper-intelligent machines they create?
Can machines be more rational or reliable than humans?
We see the machine is superior to humans in logical reasoning, information processing, and intelligent judgment. On top of that, machines transcend the physiological limitations and character flaws and contradictions of human beings. Rather than enduring the endless political scandals of each election cycle, the voting public can select an ethically
and morally consistent robot that will be reliable and trustworthy in discharging its civic duties and executing the will of the voting public.
Can AI evolve into higher quality species than humans?
This absurd 2020 election campaign also probes our insecurities and exhaustion from the social obligations, using the proposal of complete displacement of the individual human for a simulacrum as a means to question how our current political reality is impacting our sense of what human collectivity is.
A neon light installation mirrors the cube. In theory, it is a book written by an AI author, titled, The Human Element And Why We Don’t Need It
Using paradoxical concepts and humorous language, Lin Jingjing comments on the direction of our political, cultural, and social development. Lov-Lov Shop discusses the influence of reality on how we perceive general humanity and the unease we share as a collective. The artist hopes that the pressure of living in the technological era will urge us to reconsider what it means to be human.
