Text|Chih-Hsing Sun
Sometimes, life progresses in a glacial pace. In the past, I used to serve my military service at a public agency, and was ordered to create computer graphic designs. Every day, I found myself dealing with a computer installed with the ancient software of Windows XP, which ran excruciatingly slowly, rendering me helpless. Whenever I needed to move an image in Photoshop, I had to wait for the computer to catch up every step of the way. The wait of dragging an image from the right of the screen to the left was so long that I came to view it as an animation. I wondered if this process beckoned a way to generate moving images, which compelled us to re-define the sense of time, and re-examine the framework of viewing moving images. Therefore, during the wait for the movement of images to be finalized, I had a light bulb moment of conceptualizing images as low-pixel, stuck and frozen to and further develop a “coarse and low-end” methodology.
In the contemporary digital era, everyone is equipped to become a director. While photographing or filming materials found in everyday life, we might as well paste or create a collage of “whatever” from our everyday life. We probably should not call it “photographing” or “filming,” and perhaps images do not simulate things in this world, but simply reveal blatantly their poor characteristics, such as geometric shapes and serrated edges, allowing our eyes to coarsely re-calculate this world, which longs for smoothness and seamlessness. Such a worldview seems to dictate that the production of electric fans requires one to write an instruction manual by oneself: an attitude to establish a methodology.
Mini Exhibition on the Screen is themed on “revisiting the past,” and starts from anecdotes of a past strongman to unveil a fable involving defeat and migration. Using techniques of narrative films, the exhibition re-explores the landscape in front of the king, enriched with elements of “exotic animals” and “landscapes,” while uncovering stories buried in the past to re-enquire about people’s fascination and inheritance of the past.