FALSE
WITNESS
A found-footage horror tape
of transformation, forgery, and complicit witness.
Film stills
False Witness is an imitation of found-footage horror, indulging in the haunting lure of technological mystification through layers of processed footage, forging a cryptic absence.
Following the investigation of 'my own disappearance', this diary film fabricates evidence of the diasppeared woman transforming into a runaway moose on a tape of urban myth. Blending wildlife trail cams, AI forgeries, and dreamlike night-vision footage, the narrative evolves from a constant flux. Throughout the experience, the off-screen gaze from the audience makes them complicit witnesses, forming a temporary allegiance with 'me' during the making of a false alibi.
As part of the artist's investigation on layers of witnessing and the impact of absence amidst censorial erasure, the film looks at how technological processing, appropriation, and simulation of found footage – including the ones powered by today’s AI – mystify the act of ‘witnessing’. It will also offer a highly personal and empathetic response to the experience of living in an openly censored culture where only euphemism and simulation can carry messages within. The depths of said messages depend solely on the viewer’s willingness to deduce from the obvious, the gibberish, and the absent.
Throughout the film, the off-screen ‘witnesses’ and their complicity is invoked by a fluid spiral of content between surveillance, documentary, and fiction. False Witness has no single purpose. It depicts, it arouses, it generates loopholes and crosses fourth walls. Four decades after Baudrillard’s prophecy of ‘simulacra’ – how are we coping with the disorientation, knowing what we know?
Exhibition:
False Witness (Pilot, 3-channel video art, 4 minutes):
2023.9 - Sysco’s Creative AI Challenge, Outernet London, UK
False Witness (Film with live performance, 11 minutes):
2024.3 - Violent Divinity, Luckypot 196, London, UK
2024.6 - Our Slanted. Deserted. Pursuit, hARTslane, London, UK
False Witness (Single-channel looping video, 2 minutes):
2024.4 - Melting Walls, Montreux, Switzerland
False Witness (Single-channel video with subtitles, 7 minutes):
2024.10 - Antimatter [Media Art], Canada
2024.10 - Into the Flux, IBA, London, UK
2025.7 - “周末友会” Film Festival, Guangzhou, China
Award:
2023-24 - The Jamie Iddon Award for Emerging Artists, Blast Theory, UK
2025.6 - Special Mention, +RAIN AI Film Festival, Barcelona, Catalonia