Hecate comprises a series of sculptures and installations embedded within traditional darkroom photography. The project originated from research into the Shanghai Society for Psychical Studies and several early twentieth-century cases of spirit-possession photography, examining the concealed relationships among photography, artificial intelligence diffusion model technologies, and the dead, as well as the historical trauma caused by nuclear issues. Early AI diffusion models are saturated with a visual unconscious, producing humanoid figures with multiple fingers and distorted limbs—images that closely resemble grotesque bodies affected by nuclear radiation. These images hover like spectres across the century-long historical current following the invention of photography, and also manifest what Freud, in his late Romantic writings, termed the Unheimlich (the uncanny): the return of repressed desires and lost memories, latent yet profoundly unsettling. A series of traditional darkroom photographic sculptures and installations are encased in transparent resin. The photographic images are generated by artificial intelligence, yet developed and printed using gelatin etching darkroom techniques from seventy years ago. The gelatin surface manually peeled back by the artist once again echoes the surface of human skin after radiation exposure. These faint phosphorescent glows subtly connect the past and the future of history.

CS_1935

Hecate II