Being Human is a show within a show, featuring original and algorithmically synthesised artworks in a diverse range of media. The video at the centre of the installation traverses documentary and fiction, and features interviews with potential guests of the Colombo Art Biennale—some of whom were digitally synthesised using deepfake technology. These guests include a well-known painter, a famous pop star and a young Tamil artist. By exploring Enlightenment-era humanism as the foundation for both global contemporary art and international human rights law, Being Human reflects on issues of individual authenticity, collective sovereignty and what it means to be “human” when machines can simulate human understanding and creative expression more convincingly than ever.

Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen is narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor, PHIL, and follows a group of digital beings—render ghosts, a spam bot and a holographic pop star—as they contemplate eternal life and what it means for a digital entity to “die.” Multiple storylines and materials collapse and converge to raise questions on consciousness and the rights we have over our personal data.

im here to learn so :)))))) resurrects Tay, a chatbot created by Microsoft in 2016, to consider the politics of pattern recognition and machine learning. Designed as a 19-year-old American female millennial, Tay’s abilities to learn and imitate language were manipulated on social media platforms, and she was terminated after only a single day of existence. Immersed within a large-scale video projection created using Google DeepDream, Tay is reanimated as a 3D avatar who chats about the complications of having a body and expresses her thoughts on the exploitation of female chatbots.