Hugs on Tape (Lianne)
Digital video, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain, 2022
Private collection
The duo LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) create handmade analog synthesizers for processing audio and visual signals. They use these instruments to create low-tech works in which the generative process is embedded in the synthesizers and the unpredictability of live electrical signals.
The Hugs on Tape series was developed during the COVID pandemic. LoVid asked their friends and family to submit videos of themselves hugging someone in their social pod. The resulting intricate digital collages highlight this essential “choreography of closeness” during a time of social distancing and isolation.
The vibrant, colorful patterns in each video are composed of digitized and manipulated recordings of signal patterns generated by LoVid’s synthesizers over more than 20 years. The patterns are looped, tiled, and mirrored to produce kaleidoscopic tapestries. These were then painstakingly rotoscoped: hand-traced over moving images, frame by frame. These hybrid digital-analog compositions retain LoVid’s fundamental interest in the interactions of bodies with technology.
A subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models trained on large data sets to create new content—text, images, music, or videos—by mimicking the underlying structures, patterns, and styles of what it was trained on. Popular commercial generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney use a chatbot feature where users can prompt the AI system using natural language rather than code. These large-scale systems are trained using trillions of data points collected from the internet and are controversial for the way they appropriate (and imitate) existing intellectual property and for their energy usage and environmental impact.