(L)ight eats (L)ight

2025 · Film

How is a gaze constructed? We do not see the world as it is; we see through the images we have swallowed over a lifetime. (L)IGHT EAT (L)IGHT is an AI film concerning the process by which encountered light accumulates in layers until it becomes a singular way of seeing.

At the centre of the work is a creature named L-ight: a translucent being that gathers and condenses the fragments of light entering the depths of the pupil. What to swallow and what to let pass, in the space between consciousness and unconsciousness — the accumulation of these choices constitutes the substance of a gaze. Within the title, light and eat trespass upon one another, revealing that seeing and eating are the same verb. As the Chinese title 如何狩猎光 — how to hunt light — indicates, light is inverted here from a means of seeing into something captured and consumed.

The method of production enacts this proposition as structure. Photographs and footage gathered directly from daily life are digested and reinterpreted by generative AI; the resulting images are fed back into the system to be interpreted once more. What has been made by eating the original becomes an original in turn. The archival act of reinterpreting accumulated records through one's own perspective, and the machinic act of deriving results by passing vast data through a system, converge here upon the same structure. The question of how identity is constituted is repeated in the form of the production process itself.

You are what you eat; you are what you see. As the body is made of what it has eaten, the interior is shaped by the images it has beheld. Where lies the boundary between what has been received from the world and what has truly become one's own? That boundary sits in the zone where digital code and human perception intersect — within an infinite loop in which the creative and the artificial can no longer be told apart. Through the light you have swallowed, what have you become?