ZIYAO LIN
Edit Intention
Edit Intention is a multimedia installation composed of two interconnected elements: a neon light work and a video essay. The neon work presents the phrase ‘AI Intention’, visually shifting the familiar language of the attention economy towards the emerging question of intention.
The accompanying video extends this idea through a sequence of editing operations — from editing text and images to editing intention, the world and the future. It considers how AI systems increasingly participate in the conditions through which decisions are formed.
Both works are installed inside a supermarket shopping trolley. By placing AI Intention and the moving image inside an object associated with selecting, collecting and purchasing, the installation connects the seemingly private formation of intention with its potential transformation into something that can be predicted, influenced and commodified.
Research Context
The project grew out of ideas and discussions I encountered while participating in the Historical Dimensions of AI, Power & Catastrophic Risk Summer Programme at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge.
Installation
Overview
The work begins with a small linguistic transformation:
ATTENTION = AT + TENTION
INTENTION = IN + TENTION
The two words share the same ending, TENTION, while their prefixes shift from AT to IN. Rather than presenting attention and intention as separate conditions, the work treats them as overlapping structures. One does not simply disappear when the other arrives. Attention remains present inside an emerging economy increasingly concerned with intention.
Within this transition, another word appears: AI.
Through colour, spacing and the ambiguity of handwritten neon, the letters are arranged so that the sign can move between different readings — attention, intention, and AI. No single reading is intended to remain completely stable. The viewer may recognise one word first, then another, before noticing that AI has been embedded within the transition itself.
The sign functions simultaneously as language, image and commercial object. Its neon glow borrows the seductive visual language historically used to attract attention — advertising, shopfronts and urban signage.
Video essay
Video Screenshots
Acknowledgements
With thanks to the Historical Dimensions of AI, Power & Catastrophic Risk Summer Programme.
Supported by £600 research funding from Loughborough University.