Craig Tilley is an award-winning, visually impaired artist and storyteller examining humanity’s influence on the future, the environment, and each other through the technologies we are creating.
His project, “The Grapevine Wall,” saturates your senses in surreal artworks, immersive mixed reality and next-level storytelling. It documents in real-time our triumphs and struggles as the world transitions into a digitized, hyper-connected civilization. With limited central vision due to a genetic eye condition, Craig uses a unique technique to create his artwork using the art of flow on a digital canvas – carving out intricate images from simple lines. These lines are either drawn by participants or carried over from an existing piece, he calls a “vine.” Each “vine” connects to grow the organic story in real-time. Craig combines his passion for art and qualitative understanding of social and economic trends to generate work that inspires human connection and metaphysical exploration.
Craig Tilley’s work “Decoding Babel” is an immersive experience that drills down to explore deep fakes. Tilley’s deliberate use of humor, sound, and three-dimensional visuals make this work provocative, captivating and layered with surprises. Tilley shows us the extent to which deep fakes can trick us into believing that what we are seeing is real and leaves us wondering about the authenticity of videos we see on the internet.
The title “Decoding Babel” aligns very well with deep fake technology and its demonstration in this work. It poses the question of who is responsible for creating the decoder that superimposes one individual on another and also asks what language (and for what purpose) is spoken after this superimposition.
We have a small window in time to raise our consciousness, our human intelligence. Because technology is increasing at the speed of light, we could be left with a crippled collective mental state that leads us to an unwanted future we unintentionally helped create.
We can leverage a system that is programmed to give us what we want. All we must do is shift our focus away from fear and towards wonder. Let’s focus on helping others first and let’s keep on learning … every day.
