“Quảng cáo đây!” Ad Generator invites visitors to explore the uncanny intersection of modern consumer culture and early 20th-century Vietnamese rhetoric through a unique display of AI-generated advertisements. This installation recreates ads for contemporary 21st-century products using the style, tone, and language found in Nữ Giới Chung, one of Vietnam's pioneering women’s magazines. The result is both familiar and strange, blending today’s cutting-edge consumer goods with the distinctive rhetoric of a bygone era.

At its core, this ad generator is an experiment in translation studies, reversing the typical flow of intralingual translation. Instead of interpreting historical language for modern audiences, it translates modern Vietnamese into the vernacular of the early 20th century. This inversion challenges the conventional progressivist view of history as a linear progression from past to present. Instead, it suggests that history is composed of layered sediments—what might be called immanent history—that can resurface as uncanny reimaginings.

Through this process, Quảng cáo đây! raises profound questions: Is history a straightforward narrative that divides the past from the future? Or is it a malleable archive, where moments long gone can reappear in surprising forms, revealing a circularity that challenges our notions of "progress"?

Write your ads with Quảng cáo đây Ad Generator!