This is the trailer/presentation of the 360° VR movie and installation “QUESTIONING QATS – Ceci n’est pas un chat” by Maria Korporal.

“Ceci n’est pas un chat” (This is not a cat) – with this contemporary parody of the well-known statement by surrealist painter René Magritte, Maria Korporal explores the identity of AI chatbots, playing with the changing meanings of the word “chat” in French and English. Is a chat a cat?

On a wooden laptop with chalkboards, an entertaining dialogue takes place through chalk animation, where the artist alternates between asking questions in French and English to lure a chatbot into giving an explanation of its identity. The conclusion: “An unreal cat in a virtual chat” is meaningful for the scene of the virtual reality film – a surreal 360° landscape with undefinable objects and structures, and some notably large cats, all in angular low-poly style. The artist generated this landscape using artificial intelligence and then intervened with human touches, ranging from analogue to digital.

In addition to the animated wooden laptop mentioned earlier, there is a rotating spherical head of a retro electric typewriter spreading characters across the ground, occasionally forming concepts. Numerous animated pastel drawings with signs and symbols are scattered like moving graffiti over the structures in the landscape. A rotating sphere – or is it a black hole? – reveals a whirlwind of characters and texts, sometimes experiencing a short circuit.

An important element is formed by the dialogues between the chat-cats, which appear as running text on a few walls. The artist opened two ChatGPT browser windows and copied the questions and answers from one chatbot to the other and vice versa. In this way, two chatbots talk with each other. The result is stunning: dialogues about favorite books, interests and wishes emerge without human intervention. This makes us wonder: Do chatbots really have an independent identity?

The virtual reality film “Questioning Qats – Ceci n’est pas un chat” can be experienced with any VR headset or on a computer screen with a mouse.

The film can be presented independently or as part of an installation, where the wooden laptop in material form is included. A code on the laptop can be scanned giving access to a 3D animated chat-cat in augmented reality.

The soundtrack of the work was composed with the electromagnetic emissions of routers, switches and fans in a server room, found in the public domain, interrupted by cat sounds generated by the artist on a small meowing synthesizer.

“Questioning Qats – Ceci n’est pas un chat” is part of the project Qorporal Quests: a series of multimedia installations where Maria Korporal interrogates global digital development in times of war and climate change. Solutions are presented through the interplay of analogue and digital technology.

Exhibitions and presentations:
• February 23 – March 10, 2024: Wahrheit Wirklichkeit Realität, Galerie VBK Berlin.

Concept, images, camera, drawing, animation, editing, sound, AR programming © Maria Korporal, 2024

The blank model for the 3D cat in the AR part is by Brenna Souza – sironai and was downloaded from Thingiverse under license CC BY-NC: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2574178/makes

The project QORPORAL QODES is a multidisciplinary installation with charcoal drawings, flipbook animations and a 360 VR video.
The key question is: How would we interpret the digital signs if we were locked up in a bunker without electricity and internet?

Exhibitions and presentations:
• November 10, 2022 – January 7, 2023: außer ich – inner ich / part 2, INSELGALERIE Berlin.
• November 22-25, 2022: Puntomov Fest, imaginar el futuro, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Facultad de Artes UAEMex, México.
• July 22-31, 2022: Irritation – Preview (CH/D cooperation project), Galerie VBK Berlin.

1. Qorporal Qodes
Technique and size: 6 original charcoal drawings of 20 x 20 cm with related animation sequences, digital print on paper, in flipbooks measuring each approx. 10 x 14 x 2.5 cm.
Year of creation: 2022.
Origin and description: The work found its first creative input from the impossible desire to exhibit media art in a room with neither power sockets nor a stable internet connection. It occurred to me, that eventual technical fallacies stimulate a feeling of irritation with people who expect this technique to always work perfectly. Understanding this, it motivated me to find a solution to the problem as well as to try to encourage people to reflect on this phenomenon.
In this work the printed QR codes continuously change into different images by means of animated charcoal drawings. The QR codes take on the meaning of certain Q codes or Q keys. This method was developed in 1912 and used for radio communication services (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code).
The charcoal drawings are mounted in frames and the animated films have taken the form of flipbooks and can be watched without the use of electricity. However, they have been placed on the internet as well and can easily be accessed by scanning the original QR codes available on the back of the flipbooks. This to close the circle.

2. Qorporal Qube
Technique: 360° VR video, animated film
Length: approx. 5 minutes in loop
Year: 2022
Description: The 6 animated films created from “Qorporal Qodes” are projected onto all walls (including floor and ceiling) in an equilateral cube-shaped room in a 360° VR video. Watching the video with a VR headset, you’ll find yourself trapped in a room without doors or windows and surrounded by constantly changing QR codes.
How would we interpret the digital signs if we were locked up in a bunker without electricity and internet?

© Maria Korporal, 2022