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PARISIAN “SMACK DAT” EXHIBITION SHOWS THE QUIRKY SIDE OF THE SELF-KISSED POLITICIANS.

 

ART

PARISIAN “SMACK DAT” EXHIBITION SHOWS THE QUIRKY SIDE OF THE SELF-KISSED POLITICIANS.

Photo: U2p050

Text: Oxana De Castro

July 6 2023

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Photo: U2p050

Text: Oxana De Castro

July 6 2023

SHARE ARTICLE

I had this amazing experience recently during the Menswear Fashion Week in Paris. As I was moving between the shows, I happened to stumble upon the U2P050 gallery. But what caught my eye were these fascinating images of well-known politicians engaged in passionate kisses. It immediately piqued my curiosity, and I couldn’t help but delve deeper into the world of these unconventional self-kissing famous politicians. It was quite the unexpected discovery!

Tell me about yourself and your project?

Hello FXLB, we are u2p050, a creative studio combining creativity and technology. We create artworks in a variety of mediums, primarily installations, including virtual reality, artificial intelligence, audio and text. We try to conduct a reflexive approach towards technology in our practice and we see machines as active players and an essential part of our work.

For our current exhibition *Smack Dat*, running until the 13th of July at *Avant Galerie Vossen* in the center of Paris, we present a series of AI-generated *“auto-kisses”* of notable French and American political figures. Additionally, the show includes a replica of a typical Pop-Up store, with *AI auto-kisses* T-shirts and the soundscape of a simulated radio, loudly broadcasting commercials and chill-pop-house music, composed by AI covers of Kanye West, Beyoncé or Donald Trump.

What’s your background?

All studio members come from various humanities disciplines, including philosophy, art history, political science and documentary studies. This blend of backgrounds is reflected in the diversity of the creations and techniques we employ. We started producing together under this single entity, u2p050, because we believe in mixing our skills as they could converge to shape a single cohesive universe. In our minds, philosophical research, sound design, image production and text production are inextricably linked and cannot be separated. They form one way of processing and producing art.

What is the main message of this exhibit?

Honestly, *Smack Dat* was conceived as a joke exhibition, delving into the quirky side of the self-kiss symbol. The kiss of Emmanuel Macron was our very first production of an image that provokes amused reactions from the audience. We have therefore created a series of political kisses, spanning the entire political spectrum, as various interpretations of narcissism and political pride.

Given the current AI boom and the viral nature of such generated images *- such as the Pope donning Balenciaga and Donald Trump pursued by police -*, we felt it was the opportune moment to engage with the virality of these images and play with it. These images aptly portray the troubled times we are currently living, where artificially generated images still remain distinct from “real images”.

So we tried to bring another virality for these images, propel these out of the screens and infuse them with a tangible presence. Consequently, we’ve plastered the image of Macron kissing himself across Paris, conducted a sandwich board-man performance in front of the Centre Pompidou, and worn out auto-kiss T-shirts in various Parisian venues during Fashion Week.

We noticed many American and French politicians on your art? Is there any connection between two nations within the spectrum of the exhibit?

First of all, we believe there is a strong cultural overlap between the US, Europe, and France. The political and ideological problems in the United States have a big echo in France and vice versa. That is why the show includes these two references.

On another hand, we are currently working on a documentary about the Capitol attack, composed by AI-generated archives. We select sentences formulated by the various actors involved in the event, from Donald Trump’s tweets to the report presented by the 6th January Committee, and use them as *prompts* to generate our images. AI proves to be a powerful medium to produce true/fake images to speak about an event that happened mainly because of the circulation of fake news.

In *Smack Dat*, the American auto-kiss series served as references to key moments in the history of the post-truth regime, with the Bush autokiss, referring to the deceit surrounding the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Likewise, the Clinton pizza auto-kiss serves as a nod to the Pizzagate conspiracy, while the Musk auto-kiss embodies the significance of Twitter and its newly appointed COE in perpetuating the propagation of fake news.

The main visual of the exhibit is a “rug looking“ canvas portraying kissing Trump. Why Trump on the main art piece?

Trump is the very first auto-kiss that we’ve created. While generating a lot of images for the Capitol attack documentary, we tried an experiment featuring Trump engaging in self-kisses and we just loved the result. Trump is also surely the ultimate embodiment of political bride and the manipulation of information in politics. So that’s why we picked him as the main piece.

Who made/created “the kissing Trump” piece? How it is done? And how many pieces had been produced?

We collaborated with Puff Rugs, a super talented carpet maker. Lilly, from Puff Rugs and the niece of our gallerists, creates some super flashy carpets and we felt it was the perfect addition for the Pop-Up store vibe and an opportunity to dive deeper into the textile medium. Instead of generating a super realistic Trump kiss, we opted for a carton-style one that fits Lilly’s aesthetic. This Trump rug is a one on one piece! There won’t be any other.

We noticed you feminize the figures in politics. For example you portray French president with the lipstick and an eye liner. What is the message behind that?

The effect you are talking about is what we call the glowy effect. We wanted to add a kind of fake/cartoon layer to the image so that they don’t appear too realistic. This eyeliner and lipstick are among the outputs we got through artificial intelligence.

Why do you call the exhibit “Smack dat”?

Because… you know… We mean… 2003  – Akon! We felt the name of the song was the perfect match with the exhibition.

Where do me can purchase your art and your merchandise?

You can visit our Instagram (@u2p050) or our website (u2p050.com).

Auto-kiss t-shirts can be purchased directly on our website.

What’s next?

Next September, we will be showing a combination of VR and sound installation at So-Hotel in Paris. We will then go to Taiwan for two months in order to prototype a new XR work called Deep Ecology. We are pursuing a long term artistic investigation on the consequences of the global infrastructure that subtends our increased digitized world. From microchips to fiber optic cables, we’ll delve into intriguing stories, such as 3.0 nomads in Kyrgyzstan who move around the steppes with their crypto mining equipment stored in a truck.

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