The Painted Skin is inspired by a Chinese traditional ghost story of the same name. This project is a personal visual narrative set in a dystopian context. Through the photographic recreation of the story's main imagery, I would like to convey that the boundaries between God, evil, and humanity are not black and white.
Worldview
1) Totalitarian
2) Artificial consciousness distributes all the work and predict human future
3) Bug on computer becomes urban legend
4) There is an organization takes in all the artificial consciousness and control them, but there is consciousness defected and run away
5) Human beings are still in their original body
Storyline
I met a girl through the internet and we met each other using visual reality glasses. As time went by, I started getting really serious to this girl so I turned to the artificial consciousness to let it predict our future. (It’s just like what we do nowadays when a girl come across some problems or meet someone, she turns to a fortuneteller for help.)
So, normally the artificial consciousness prints a document and there is information listed on it, but this time the artificial consciousness printed a paper full of messy codes. There were bugs. But artificial consciousness is always right, it was so weird and just like an urban legend. So, I get suspected and I hacked into the girl’s computer and found that the body she used when she met me on the visual reality world was created by herself and there were no other clues of her appearance, she actually had no body.
She was a defected artificial consciousness. So, I turned to the legal Artificial Consciousness in system. They get it, and deleted it.
The girl came to me because she wanted to get into my brain and took my body so she could become a real person. Visual consciousness has no body.
But actually, she didn’t know that I, myself, was an artificial consciousness too, but just I did it successfully.