I Still Feel Fantastic is a video work, developed during the Real Sur Real workshop with Anja Masling & Jerszy Seymour.
The starting point was a video from 2009, published on Youtube, called I Feel Fantastic. The mystified caption tells the creepy story of Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion who sought to create for himself a perfect, pure, unsullied companion, supposedly the singing robot we witness in the video. He used his particular skills to this end: he created a statue bride.
Up to the current day, the video has generated more than 17 million views and massive interest in deciphering the story of the person uploading the video. One of the earliest videos to spark the imaginations of countless social media users is a deeply disturbing clip.
An unexpected shot appears in the clip, showing an outdoor location. Through the comments, one can follow the unfolding speculation for a murder, buried body and similar derivatives, that only an internet trope can produce.
The singing female android robot is the absolute embodiment of what we call uncanny valley. The unsettling feeling of is generated by the impersonated assignment of feelings by a non-human entity, namely Tara The Android.
I further studied singing as a notion of embodied voice and its fundamentals to humans. Within my research, I collected a variety of video material, where human-made non-human entities are singing.
In the video I reconstructed the image of those representations and applied the again to human models, making them all sing the I-feel-fantastic song. Thus they became a quire, the unified female image-object utilised endless times through sci-fi cinema and literature to represent the idealised image of the unattainable and objectified female figure.
In the video work, I titled I Still Fell Fantastic, as a tribute to its original, I’m aiming to show the gaps between the real, the surreal and its mediated construct to emphasise the simulated character of human approximation.
By revealing the mechanisms, both realism and surrealism become a tool to reduce reality to the mediation of its image and show once again how we’ve already accepted the modelled, unrealistic image making as part of our reality.