“Still” by Shuang Li

2022 · CH/DE · colour · En · 3′

An image that’s trying to get rid of its shadow.

“Still” is a music video of musician Osheyack’s album Intimate Publics, a haunting sonic assemblage of deep ambient rumble and the reverberant ricochet of stock samples lifted from Yamaha’s Vocaloid software, a singing voice synthesizer frequently used to breathe life into Japanese virtual idols. The track layers superlatives like ‘will you still care for me?,’ ‘I’m close to you’ and ‘I want somebody to love,’ slurring the sense-making function of the Vocaloid’s stock phrases, rendering them unintelligible. In an extension of their collaboration, Shuang Li achieves the same effect with stock footage in her music video for the track, weaving together glossy vignettes seamlessly into an identifiably artificial narrative.

The artist

Shuang Li (b.1990, Wuyi, China) currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Wuyi, China. Situated in globalized communication systems and inspired by various localities and uneven information flows, Li’s work, which encompasses performance, interactive websites, sculpture, and moving image installations, studies various mediums composing the contemporary digital landscape. Crucial to this practice is the interaction between the medium and its users, as well as amongst the mediums themselves. These diverse forms of intimacy form a motif that runs through the artist’s practice, as she explores how various forms of technology bring us into contact, and how they form part of a neoliberal apparatus that regulates the body and desire. Yet her focus is not limited to the virtual, but also includes the material lives of those digital landscapes, such as the infrastructure and logistics systems that support it, and more importantly, the cracks in between.