In the documentary, the artist discloses her misalignment of history and memory through a fictional natural landscape, along with delving into the authenticity of collective perception between the virtual and the natural.
Oftentimes humans invert the notion that things in real life are merely simulacra within the scenery of technology or habitually assume scenes they have never participated in across the explosion of informational feeding. This can lead to some sort of false judgment of omniscience in the unknown. These remembrances are generally unanchored in time, with fragmented substitutions and displacements shaping the facets of memory into a polyhedron. They are hastily ritualized and ambiguously revered, interpreting a dissociative, specimen-like perceptual experience.
This piece is composed of three looping clips respectively constructed from fake transparent images, stock videos, digital icons, and 3D models. The film reveals how the human, the natural, and the political are coordinated and coexist in technology.
We are overloaded by data in the digital era in which sensory perceptions are constantly coded, mutated, and translated. Oftentimes we plunge ourselves into news feed from unverified sources and consume them unconsciously. Fragments of information then linger in the memory and start garbling our senses. However, we are most likely not prepared or willing to converge them with the mind.
‘A Plastic Tree Waited to Be Ignited’ is part of the long-term series ‘Practical Guidelines for Gardening Maneuvers’ that explores natural and fake plants as a metaphor to illustrate the interdependent appearances between humans and technology.
A Plastic Tree Waited to Be Ignited
2022
Single-channel Video Installation
AI Generated Visuals, Fake Plant, Projector, Speakers
This project attempts to provoke a dialogue between constricted nature, data hegemony, generative behaviors, and digital indigestion. The artist stages the intertwined resonance of humans and technology by questioning how effortlessly we get immersed into the world of false information and the numbness caused by digital accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
In the past decades, the wild progress of urbanization and the ever-changing technologies have made people living in cities easily build a high-speed lifestyle and surrounded by concrete. Contacting with nature or greenery is extremely limited to occasional visits to spaces such as parks and squares. I've been trying to explore an imagination of future botany through AI algorithms and animation. I take the shadows of plastic plants as a subject to open up a dialogue within the natural/artificial simulacra and the virtual identity. By using the sensory perceptions being coded and translated, I attempt to present the interdependent appearances of human beings and the data.
People originally installed security cameras in public or private spaces, intending to make themselves more secure. However, thousands of surveillance cameras have been exposed on the Internet and are accessible to all Internet users. These unsecured cameras are located in "places," such as houses and bedrooms, or in "non-places," such as malls, restaurants, freeways, parking lots, and green spaces of all countries in the world. Within the specific live-streaming cameras that target trees, leaves, and green spaces as the main subjects, this video installation intends to blur the boundary between places and non-places. While watching 11 real-time feeds of the cameras arranged by time zones, the audience will also be watched by the trail camera hidden in the tree.
With the installation spying on the audience, and the audience spying on the trees, this piece changes viewers' perspectives on observation and being observed. Simultaneously, the venue can also be seen as a "non-place," which takes place between the virtual world and actual spaces in which people anonymously interact with each other.
Enunenunable stands for simultaneously enable and unable.
By continuously vibrating the tree, leaves that fall on the water cause ripples, which will trigger digital noises. In this fast-moving world, people are forced to be fed with a large amount of information explosively through algorithms; that's when we gradually lose our acumen and become anxious that we cannot fully control our autonomy. Compared with plants, between minerals and animals, they absorb and decompose nutrients naturally through the digestive system, which is something that human beings now find hard to do with their life online. Anyone can write, rewrite, overthrow, and redefine through the Internet. Therefore, people are often passively receiving, intuitively responding, and absorbing without filtering.
Memory is constantly being written into the data structure. The world holds the memory of all traces. People now continue to experience the state of continuous overwriting. For example, when we can stay anonymous and rent lockers in public spaces, I am using it for this hour, and you will leave your briefcase at the same position for the next two hours, but in the next minute or the week after we rent it, we will all be overwritten by thousands of data. I install web cameras to capture images when people open lockers and then use a robotic google image search program to find a picture most closely resembling the last picture, and drag that picture to find the next, etc. This work is a reflection of our relationship with technology. In the big data, everyone is just passing by.
‘Neither Here nor There’ is a video installation created by two artists who live in different time zones. The distance between Taiwan and the United States is approximately 12208km, the time difference is about 13 hours, and the temperature difference is around 20 degrees. The two projectors keep moving back and forth between both walls, and the images of subtropical and coniferous forests get blurry/clear when one approaches/leaves.
In the world of moving images, this kind of media becomes a specific way of perception structured by the dimension of time. The work explores an implication of desire and opens up a dialogue within physical location and identity.
‘[Chorus] Orchestrating Escapes’ is a video installation attempting to convey the reflection of people trying to escape from real life.
[Chorus] Orchestrating Escapes
2018
Single-channel Video Installation
Projector, Turning Table, Motor
I tried to virtualize an escape drill through images. You thought you were fleeing from this place, but actually, you could never escape to any other places just like the bunny.
The projector keeps rotating back and forth like a flashlight in the center of the space, and the image forms a blurry silhouette on the wall by penetrating through the plastic net and vines. The bunny being constantly chased by the unpredictable light, forming an interactive relationship between the virtual image and the actual installation.
We are currently more disconnected and lonelier than ever when technology is contributing to the increase in loneliness — always trying hard to reconstruct the relationships with people around us, which, in the past few years, I’ve suffered to bring back and failed. It was as if a forest fire arose and burned down all the trees abruptly and a lone tree in the woods which still got no place to belong. I feel so detached and abandoned by this universe. Even when I stand in a row, but actually, I’m in the middle of nowhere.