“They/Them” is an introspective kind of video essay in which Juan Obando uses Adobe Stock clips to animate them while maintaining their logo watermark. Through this process, the artist manages to have the characters in the clips embody the images’ own “voices” and speak about their nature as stock videos, reflecting on their condition in relation to the “outside world” —the material reality.

Obando used voice-cloning technology to cast a variety of artificial voices and produce various vocal tracks reciting a script written by him. He then animated the actors’ mouths and facial expressions using a computer processing framework that syncs the previously processed audio tracks to a target video. Finally, he stitched together the resulting animated clips and other videos found on Adobe Stock to produce a first-person narrative.

The piece aims to prompt a reflection on global media ecosystems, cultural imperialism, adversarial dynamics, and the exacerbation of the so-called arsenals of democracy. It also proposes an echoing commentary on the dialectics between images and image-makers, spectators and protagonists, and the ever-thinning lines that divide them, and us.