Text｜Lee Chia-Lin
In Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media published in 2001, he analyzed the seemingly endless references to past media content, artistic styles, and forms in contemporary new media creations. He stated that “rather than assembling more media recordings of reality, culture is now busy reworking, recombining, and analyzing already accumulated media material.” In this case, can artistic creation continuously update itself? The answer is undoubted yes, and perhaps this approach is even more closely related to contemporary life and more effective in conveying content than mere representation.
Remix is a technique frequently used in music production, where existing tracks are edited and mixed using specific machines or computers to create new music. Therefore, in a remixed song, one can hear familiar melodies in different forms and combinations. The exhibition borrows the concept of remixing to understand how artists sample their daily lives and create sensory experiences that extend from but differ from their initial memories and general perceptions.
The exhibition features six groups of artists, presenting a total of ten works, including video installations, kinetic installations, and spatial installations. On the performance side, four groups of artists offer immersive audio-visual live performances. I elaborate on the remix strategies of these works through three subtopics: direction, scale, and boundaries, which can serve as a reference for entering the works. Of course, you are also free to explore according to your own preferences.
Reorientation…
In Remigrate, we follow Hu Ching-Chuan as she returns to Hua Xin Street, the Myanmar Street, in Zhonghe, where she grew up. Ching-Chuan uses 3D scanning to recreate the streetscape in the digital world, and transforms her embodied memories of walking through the model with camera movements. The space presented in the film is not composed of real geographic coordinates but is a discontinuous landscape that intertwines her personal memories and family history. It also reflects her new understanding of nostalgia in the digital age. People’s resistance, fear, and eventual acceptance of new technology——this process of change, like migration, seems to constantly lead us to construct new lifestyles.
Also exploring the sense of direction in their work are Su Tsan-Yuan’s two video installations Planet and Single-Storey Building. In Planet, the central projection light source continuously rotates. As the light source turns to different liquid crystal screens, we can see the images on them. The artist has created a model of his living space that may face urban renewal and further produced a 3D animation. By deconstructing and modifying the liquid crystal screens, Tsan-Yuan attempts to re-examine the relationship between home and self from an anatomical perspective, just as the relationship between the light source and the images in the installation shows a state of intersubjectivity.
In contrast to Planet, which presents horizontal light changes, Single-Storey Building deconstructs the domestic space from a vertical direction while continuing to explore the relationship between home and space. The original vertical floor layout of the row house is disassembled and placed in a flat four-channel video. Looking up at this box installation made of screens and mirrors, viewers will discover an infinitely extending space within, yet unrecognizable in terms of floor features. Just as old houses are rebuilt into elevator apartments, the perception of living spaces is standardized, leaving the only difference between living on a lower and a higher floor to be the elevator buttons.
Alien Scales of Things
When familiar objects appear at unfamiliar scales, they always subvert our understanding. Hsieh Yu-Cheng’s Star Cluster: Port produced on-site for this exhibition, continues his exploration of luminescent materials since 2016, constantly creating images through a method of “bypassing machines”——without any image signals input or output through machines, yet strongly evoking the presence of image machines. The artist strings together plastic fragments painted with RGB colors into bead curtains, cutting across the exhibition space, as if a huge LED screen looms before us. In front of this glowing screen that displays no specific content, people seem tiny and insignificant, and pushing aside the bead curtains seems to allow passage to the other side of the screen. White Null in the same room can be seen as an intertext of Star Cluster: Port. The video shows a close-up of water droplets sliding across the screen, magnifying the numerous RGB pixels that compose the LED screen, allowing us to glimpse the underlying structure of image generation.
Inter net II by Simple noodle art (Chen Zi-Yin X Chuang Gotop) presents a situation in which people cannot grasp the amount of data they create. It is almost impossible to imagine a life without the internet, or even to have never experienced such a time; “Ask Google for everything” has become a contemporary belief. The artist accidentally discovered that Google had retained her more than 70,000 search records over the past decade. She printed out all of these records to display, revealing private yet extremely objective and detailed search records like a diary, laid bare in front of the audience. Every curious, troubled, worried, or malicious search accumulates into a personal-centered data collection. Inter net II transforms this everyday experience through a concrete installation: Google remembers what you have forgotten.
Chen Zi-Yin’s How To Improve Photo Quality by AI | Noise Reduction, Super-resolution Tutorial orchestrates another understanding of scale, from the vastness of space to a single pixel in a photo. The work mimics a common YouTube tutorial, using the 1990 photograph “Pale Blue Dot”, taken by the space probe Voyager 1, as a demonstration of AI noise reduction and super-resolution image editing. “Consider again at that dot,” accompanied by the moving voiceover of astronomer Carl Sagan, we will witness AI image editing software efficiently transform the small dot in the “Pale Blue Dot”——the Earth captured from 6.4 billion kilometers away——into a smooth, high-resolution photo. It is as if, in the world of AI, the planet on which humans dwell has never existed.
Blurring the Boundaries
Boundaries are crucial to our understanding of the relationships between ourselves and others. Lin Che-Yu’s The Daily Moments and The Fourth Wall create a familiar yet unfamiliar daily landscape with a light touch. The Daily Moments connects the virtual switches and lights in the projected image through programming. When the lights in the image are turned off or adjusted for brightness, the brightness of the image changes accordingly; conversely, when the audience pulls one of the on-site switches, the lights in the image also toggle. It seems as if the here and now is connected to an unknown or even completely fictional world in such a subtle way.
The Fourth Wall creates a seemingly existent but actually non-existent wall in the exhibition space, “attempting to extend the image from reality.” In theater and film theory, the “fourth wall” refers to the one-way invisible wall near the audience seats on a proscenium stage or screen. Actors seem unable to see the audience, while the audience witnesses the drama from an omniscient perspective. In Che-Yu’s work, this “fourth wall” appears in a different way, probing the boundaries between reality and fiction.
Finally, Hu Ching-Chuan’s installation Awakening is situated in front of a large glass panel at the end of the well-lit exhibition space. The artist uses program-controlled artificial branches to tap on the window, creating a sudden disturbance in the quiet exhibition space with a deft touch. This prompts people to start observing their surroundings and searching for the origin of the disturbance, an experience that could be understood as serendipity. Going back to the question at the beginning of the article, can the continuous referencing, reproducing, reconstructing, and analyzing creative methods constantly bring forth new ideas? Perhaps we can further ask if we are aware of serendipity in our daily lives and explore along those lines.
Physicist Carlo Rovelli proposes a counterintuitive yet poetic idea in his book The Order of Time: to see the world as a network of events rather than a composition of physical matter. By viewing things through a longer lens of time, we can understand that certain things that seem unchanging only temporarily exist in seemingly unchanged forms, and the world may be closer to a combination of perceptual events.
The artworks are extracted from their original creative context and combined in the exhibition to meet the audience as an event. We can also understand the exhibition as a remix. In the arrangement of the exhibition space, we have designed a sequence for reading these works. However, their relationships are not fixed, and each visit to the exhibition can be a new reading. Which corner of the exhibition makes you feel particularly connected? Which work seems especially distant to you? Or even on an unknown day after leaving the gallery, you may find a moment in your daily life that overlaps with today’s memories.
Sensation remix, wildly welcomed.
