言为心声 is a Chinese idiom meaning “words are the voice of the heart.”
But where does the heart go when that voice is displaced from a body?
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In a world where artificial intelligence accelerates and replicates the human form, the boundary between spirit and simulation begins to dissolve. Time, life, and voice become commodities. The body, once a sacred vessel, is left to wonder what it now holds—if anything at all.
40 Epochs is a hybrid-narrative film that explores spiritual displacement, fractured identity, and the unseen labor behind human-like technologies. Inspired by the artists’ own experience training an AI model to reproduce Sun’s voice, the film follows a voice donor in solitude as she performs reverent acts of reading, recording, and revising. What begins as ritual becomes rupture, as she reckons with the cost of entwining intimate gestures with the relentless demands of repetitive systems.
The film’s narration is carried by the very artifact at its core: a synthetic voice generated from Sun’s speech. Disembodied from its origin, it speaks in her place—echoing the tensions at the heart of technologies that aim to optimize and replace. What emerges is a poetic and uncanny meditation on memory, embodiment, and the haunting estrangement of being heard—without being present.
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Interview with Artisle
As human instincts, memory, and cognition become increasingly mediated by technology, how do you think this shift redefines our relationship with non-human entities (e.g., algorithms, intelligent objects, or ecological systems)? How does your work reflect this ongoing paradigm shift in cognition?
Our work reflects this shift by deliberately complicating the boundary between human and machine, memory and data, intention and automation. In 40 Epochs, the narrative unfolds across three temporal embodiments of a single central character, each reflecting a different relationship to time and memory: the voice donor embodies the past, her recorded speech forming the raw data used to train the AI; the narrator occupies the present, reflecting on the training process; and the generated version of the donor—constructed from her own vocal data—does not represent the future, but rather a distorted in-between of past and present: a synthetic voice recycling memory. This uncanny echo serves as an allegory for how generative AI functions: not by projecting forward, but by endlessly reprocessing the past to simulate a future.
When retelling or overwriting traditional myths or historical narratives through technological media, how do you address their ontological differences? Do you consciously employ technological “fabrication” as a creative strategy, and how do you navigate the resulting fractures and reconstructions of cultural memory?
40 Epochs engages with traditional myths and historical narratives obliquely, by exploring the ontological differences that arise when the past is filtered through the interpretive logic of AI. Rather than retelling specific myths or narratives, the work constructs its own mythological logic—one in which AI functions not merely as a tool, but as an active, recursive force that reshapes memory through approximation and repetition. In that sense, we employ “technological fabrication” as a deliberate creative strategy—not to modernize or faithfully reproduce existing narratives, but to explore how they unravel and reform within generative systems. The gaps that emerge are not seen as something to mend, but rather become the narrative fabric itself.
In the context of globalized technological development, different civilizations have fundamentally distinct understandings and applications of technology across time. How do you effectively intervene in established technological and cultural discourses through your artistic practice?
This question brings to mind the philosophies of Yuk Hui, who writes extensively about cosmotechnics—which he defines as “the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities.” He critiques the notion of a universal technology, so dominant in Western thought, and instead calls for a plurality of technological practices rooted in different cosmologies and ethical systems.
In our work, we take this kind of philosophical grounding as a point of departure. Rather than treating technology as neutral or inevitable, we approach it as a cultural and moral expression—one that encodes specific values, temporalities, and ontologies. In 40 Epochs, we explore this by turning AI back onto itself through the process of training, using it as a medium to probe and critique the implicit universalities embedded in its own conditions of production and reproduction.
Through emphasizing the paradoxes within these technologies, our work confronts the broader cultural conditions shaped by the dominant narratives of globalized technological systems. It opens a space—however provisional—for the ontological and epistemological complexity that cosmotechnics brings into view.
Has the fluidity and hybridity of identity, enabled by digital technology, influenced your cross-cultural creative process? How do you articulate the tension between technologically induced identity fragmentation and cultural roots in your work?
We appreciate the thought behind this question, as it touches on a tension that runs deep in our practice. That said, we feel it’s best left unanswered in this context—40 Epochs itself is our attempt to grapple with that very complexity. Rather than resolving the contradictions between technologically fragmented identity and cultural rootedness, the work dwells within them, letting the form, process, and voice carry what language alone cannot.
How do you perceive the dual nature of digital art—its materiality (e.g., audiovisual hardware) and immateriality (e.g., data, virtual representation)—in shaping artistic expression and audience interpretation/experience?
This binary between materiality and immateriality in digital art is an interesting premise. In our practice, the so-called “immateriality” often comes from the software we develop and the algorithmic systems we work with. Before turning to film as a medium, we worked primarily in performance, where one of our main concerns was making the software’s presence felt—rendering the invisible logics and structures of code into embodied, emotional, or temporal experience.
That said, we never saw “materiality” as limited to hardware. We weren’t trying to make the software tangible in a physical sense, like through screens or devices. Instead, we were interested in how code could shape affect, attention, or rhythm—how it could be felt rather than seen. In that way, we approach materiality not as an object, but as a condition of experience.
In 40 Epochs, this continues. The generated voice, the recursive structure, the spectral presence of training data—these all point to something immaterial, yet deeply embodied in how the work is perceived and felt. We’re less interested in the split between material and immaterial, and more in how digital systems blur that distinction altogether.
In an era dominated by technological rationality, how do you perceive art’s potential to enact dialectical critique on technological systems through its alogical qualities?
We’d actually push back on the assumption that technological systems are purely governed by rationality. In our view, these systems can be just as “alogical” as the art that critiques them. So much of what goes into the design and development of technology is shaped by personal, cultural, and institutional value systems—often implicit and rarely consistent. These values are encoded and structure how the world is represented, what is prioritized, and what is rendered invisible. And values, by nature, are not strictly logical.
We also believe that art’s potential for critique doesn’t come from its opposition to logic, but from its ability to make felt the assumptions and blind spots embedded in systems that present themselves as rational and objective. The danger arises when we begin to believe too fully in the supremacy of rational systems—because when everything is framed as optimized, quantifiable, and knowable, the innate human impulse for art, ambiguity, and questioning begins to disappear.
Created with the support of THE VHAWARDS and Hyundai Artlab
