Can Humans Learn to be AI Bots? Inside Lau Wai’s Video Game Art Show

Description

With the power of AI looming large, what will be the ultimate role of humans? Hold onto that thought for now.

The ninth annual de Sarthe Artist Residency (deSAR) culminates in artist Lau Wai’s solo exhibition After ‘Intelligence,’ where five video works and a single-player game stage a closed loop: humans undergo AI training while AI learns to act human. At its centre is Wai, a digital avatar built from motion and facial capture, who enrols in a “Human to AI” course to stay competitive and is digitised in the process.

Interestingly, in The Cast of the Proxy series, replicas labelled W.A.I. learn to run, clean, dance and perform kung fu using motion data from real robot footage, framing machine learning as documentary process rather than fiction. The final work hands visitors control over Wai’s fate — return to the physical world or become another W.A.I. — forcing a direct confrontation with the question of what tasks we delegate and what, if anything, is not ours to give.

Born in 1982, Lau holds a masters of fine arts in visual arts degree from Columbia University and works across many disciplines: moving images, 3D animation, interactive media, photography and installation. Their practice draws on personal and historical archives, cinematic imagery, popular culture and emerging technologies to examine how history, fiction, memory and virtuality intersect in identity formation — and, increasingly, how AI and data generation reshape contemporary society.