Where is the Price

Canhe Yang

Artwork Description:

Where Is the Price makes a supply chain visible as a place. The infrastructure behind AI image generation — mines, fabs, annotation offices, e-waste yards — is distributed across the Global South, made invisible by the interfaces that depend on it. The work maps it, then puts the viewer inside it. The work exists in two forms. As physical works, it presents three maps — the planetary supply-chain network, AI fabrication sequences, and workers' labour sites — alongside a sculpture against the weightlessness AI promotes. As a WebXR interactive system, the work takes the form of a preserved supply-chain body grown from 348 routes, 21 chain-episodes, and 410 nodes — spanning mineral extraction, annotation labour, and e-waste processing. The routes update when geopolitical events — sanctions, blockades, conflicts — disrupt supply chains; corresponding routes dim or disappear, subject to artist approval. The viewer first encounters the body from orbit — the full route network visible across its surface — then enters it on foot, navigable in browser or on Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro. The infrastructure kills them — through one of six mechanisms: jaw-crusher fragments, dicing lasers, scan columns, shredder teeth, container slabs, arc discharges. They restart. The death repeats. As events accumulate, new mechanisms are added. The ways to die grow as the world changes. AI image generation presents itself as instantaneous and immaterial. The interactive body makes it slow, wet, and anatomical. Supply-chain violence does not stop; neither does the work.