REAL & LEGIT Chicago Childhood Footage

"REAL & LEGIT Chicago Childhood Footage" is a playful autobiographical project that blends my childhood recordings from Chicago with AI-generated video and AI voice synthesis, trained on my own voice. The project creates a series of deep fake footage narrated with sarcasm and irony, reflecting my family experience as part of the diaspora in the U.S. The methodology behind this project includes absurd editing techniques, dry humor, and intentionally mistranslated subtitles. The themes revolve around East Asia, diaspora, American politics, identity politics, Asian experiences, returning immigration, and Taiwan-U.S. relations. By intentionally using bad taste and questionable graphic design, it references the early 2000s, a period when digital editing tools became widely accessible for personal use. Through the juxtaposition of AI-generated visuals and old footage, the project delves into the media archaeology of our evolving relationship with family video and memory in the current era of AI authenticity crisis.

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From 1997 to 2003, my family documented my childhood in Chicago on VHS tapes. After relocating to Taiwan in 2003, we left the tapes unwatched for nearly 20 years due to format incompatibilities. In 2023, upon returning to Chicago, I began digitizing these 20 tapes, transforming them into narrative-driven comedic shorts in this project. As these tapes were digitized, they not only served as records of my childhood but also marked the transition from analog to digital media. By reinterpreting these past visuals through AI, the project goes beyond representing memories—it reflects on how visual technology reshapes our understanding of the past and how it alters the way of seeing.

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YouTube playlist: LINK