Ave Imperator

Tomas Laurenzo · 2024 · Generative video

Content note: war, displacement, injury, fear, and loss.

The artwork

Ave Imperator examines the relationship between political power, mediated speech, and the suppression of vulnerable voices within contemporary geopolitical conflict.

The work uses recordings of official public appearances and press briefings by presidents and prime ministers. Their institutional settings remain intact: podiums, flags, microphones, calibrated gestures, and the visual grammar through which political authority presents itself. The altered recordings carry selected Palestinian accounts of bombardment, displacement, imprisonment, and everyday life. The recovered sources include children in Gaza and an eighteen-year-old detainee from Qabatiya in the West Bank.

The resulting dissonance places accounts produced under conditions of extreme vulnerability within images of institutional authority. The work considers how political and media systems determine whose speech is amplified, recognized as credible, or relegated to the margins.

Context

Completed in 2024, Ave Imperator emerged in response to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza following the attacks of 7 October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent military campaign. This text records the circumstances in which the artwork was produced; it is not a continuously updated account of the war.

In February 2024, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child stated that no child in Gaza was free from fear, pain, and hunger.

“Real-time injustice, even of the most epic sort, is often simply not recognized as such at the time, no matter how obvious the injustice later appears. Man is hard wired to submit (adapt) to any condition and then consider it normal. Our acceptance of injustice is reinforced by the going ideology.”

Mark Ames, Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion, 2005, p. 43.

Method and ethics

Synthetic speech and audiovisual manipulation make political figures appear to recount experiences attributed to other people. The accounts were selected and edited from videos acquired on YouTube, published by journalists and humanitarian organizations. The resulting act of speech is an artistic construction.

The title refers to a salutation to an emperor. The work makes an image of political authority carry an account that also addresses it. This changes the account’s presentation and political direction; the decisions about selection, editing, and apparent delivery remain the artist’s.

A retrospective source reconstruction identifies six witnesses across five publishing organizations. Two of the eight testimony blocks still lack complete source identification. The material supports neither a collective description of every speaker as a child in Gaza nor a claim that synthetic reuse transfers narrative agency to the witnesses.

The reconstruction also identifies an error in a preserved still: the on-screen label gives Mohammed’s age as fourteen, whereas contemporaneous reporting identifies Mohammed Nazzal as eighteen. The historical still is retained as documentation of the work; this statement corrects the biographical attribution. Public circulation of an account is not treated as consent to its synthetic reuse.

Artwork record

Artist
Tomas Laurenzo
Year
2024
Medium
Generative video
Format
Single-channel video
Source material
Recordings of political appearances and selected Palestinian accounts acquired from published videos
Materials
Recorded political appearances, selected published Palestinian accounts, synthetic speech and edited moving image
Tools
AI-assisted speech synthesis, audiovisual processing and video editing
Duration
Approximately 7 minutes 19 seconds
Display dimensions
Variable

References

Exhibitions and screenings

Artist biography

Tomas Laurenzo is a Uruguayan artist, researcher and computer scientist whose work examines the cultural and political consequences of computation.

He is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Media Practices at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, University of Colorado Boulder. His research and teaching span artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, virtual and augmented reality, computer graphics, visualisation, human perception, digital lutherie, aesthetics, art theory and critical approaches to technology.

Laurenzo's artistic practice includes installations, moving image, performance, live cinema, generative systems, interactive works, music, new instruments and critical software. His projects treat artistic, technical and scholarly activity as parts of the same practice, moving between physical and digital media and between the studio, the laboratory and public culture.

His work has been presented internationally at contexts including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH Asia, ISEA, NeurIPS, ECCV, Sónar+D, MUTEK, TEI, NIME, CVPR, the Contemporary Art Centre of Andalucía, Osage Gallery, the Goethe-Institut, Teatro Solís and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. He has produced more than sixty peer-reviewed publications, participated in more than eighty exhibitions and delivered more than one hundred invited lectures.

Before joining the University of Colorado Boulder, Laurenzo was Assistant Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. He has also been affiliated with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Microsoft Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Brunel University, Ericsson, the University of Iowa, Stochastic Labs and INRIA.

At Universidad de la República in Uruguay, he founded and directed the Engineering School's media lab and the university's research group on human–computer interaction. He completed his PhD and MSc in Computer Science through Uruguay's Basic Sciences Development Programme, PEDECIBA. His doctoral adviser was Alvaro Cassinelli and his master's adviser was Sergi Jordà.