Three channel video. 5’20”. Singing and composition by Bibi Zhou/周笔畅. Lyrics by machine learning text generation neural networks. Voice over by Benjamin Hwang. Arrangement by Dizzla D Music. Commissioned by the UCCA Centre of Contemporary Art and supported by Backslash at Cornell Tech.

The music in Miao Ying's Aphasia is a mix of Christian Rock and romantic R&B, to worship ideologies instead of the spiritual. We used models trained to simulate the writing styles of humans--which had successfully generated text in the style of Shakespeare in the past--to generate the lyrics of the music of the video. We fed the computer to learn from B F skinner’s behaviorism theory, Chinese online novels (in the popular style/template of “Bossy, boss loves me”), and 45,000 classic romantic R&B lyrics and rapper Kanye West. Each text represented a particular ideology, those different blending of texts and ideologies achieved a unique style of writing, that is completely computer generated.

Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The video shows the relationship between the sheep/followers and their shepherds/controllers, the dog and drone. The middle screen represents the sheep, while the screen on the left represents the dog as the the original shepherd, and the screen on the right shows the modern shepherd, which is a herding drone that can mimic the dog barking.

We asked Chinese pop star Bibi Zhou/周笔畅 to sing the the song with a romantic R&B beat according to the lyrics generated by the computer. Bibi Zhou debuted her singing career by winning the second place at the Chinese singing contest Super Girl in 2005, in which viewers are able to participate in the judging process by sending text messages with their mobile phones to vote for their favorite contestants, considered as one of the largest "democratic" voting exercises in mainland China.

Lyrics

Verse 1:

You changed my sympathy
I can’t face the questions
I’m just a behavior
I don’t think about her cause
I believe in love forever
So darling I love you
and I don’t need no conditioning

Chorus:

I want to wake up from me
I think I’m a process
This is the purpose
I will always be your kind contrast
Love is on the selection

Verse 2:

Stay with me
With your practical fire
Contact the culture that we used to be

Bridge:

Shine your autonomy on me
I hear the initiation coming
You made me feel culture

Chorus:

I want to wake up from me
I think I’m a process
This is the purpose
I will always be your kind contrast
Love is the only selection