HECTARE is pleased to present Taro Karibe’s solo exhibition “Electric Caveman”. Using AI-powered software, The Artist/ Photographer KARIBE misleads the automatic image recognition system of landscape photographs and confuses the AI, which has learnt from hundreds of millions of images, to generate images with strange perspective and colors. The images are a beautiful and seductive mix of distorted, crumbling, unstable images and sinking, subdued colors.
　When it was invented, photography was described as a “mirror with memory”. With the evolution of civilization and technology, it has become commonplace today for our human memories and records to be stored as data rather than material. In other words, as external storage devices, digital devices are considered to be part of the human brain. AI systems are also encroaching into people's lives and becoming indispensable. Karibe's photographs, which make full use of AI, the vanguard of our time, are perhaps a "mirror reflecting the borderline between human and digital". And the scene, which seems to have been invaded by "something unidentifiable", cannot help but inspire a sense of awe. In addition, the software with this AI is constantly being updated and its accuracy is continually improving. This has "gradually strengthened the egos and biases of the AI", says Karibe. Using the latest technology of the time and incorporating cognitive psychology and ancient philosophy in the radically developing digital technology, KARIBE's works give us a new perspective that we have never seen before.