The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers: soundtrack

Hallucination, mental illness, doppelgänger and artificial intelligence – these concepts all congeal into the exhibition’s namesake centerpiece film-work, The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers. It introduces the viewer to Rosy’s life story: early fascination with spirals, experiences with hallucinatory psychedelics, schizophrenic episodes, joining Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), and ultimately uploading her consciousness to cyberspace and thereby living her life as an animated character. The film starts with found footages that range from Dadaist cinema to early Fleischer studio animations, and ends with an animation of Rosy’s avatar meandering in cyberspace and being molested by a panda-headed man. The exploration of digital consciousness and virtual reality is an important progression of Su’s artistic practice, which had long investigated the limits of the mind-body duality in man-organic and man-bionic/prosthetic hybrids.