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:
• December 2-7, 2024: Field of View, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA.
• September 10-15, 2024: #NarrarElFuturo: X Festival de Cine & Nuevos Medios, Bogotá, Colombia.
• 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