User:Chen Junyu/Headings/Reading Writing & Research Methodologies/Trim3/method
It is a video with fragments of sceneries seen from train and bus between 2008 and 2012 in China.The video has subtitles regarding random talk from travellers.The subtitles function as talking map, location of passengers in the train.To present these two contents , the screen is splitter into two parts.One is the footage of outside view, the other part is the subtitles.These footages are taken from different trips. You can see different landscapes outside the window.When it starts displaying ,all the contents show on the screen gonna move slightly from right to left.
I collected and placed this footages in order by time.Depending on how close up the view is of each footage (how much information is visible or not)I give them different sizes in the video and a different place in the screen. For the subtitles, I place these subtitles in imaging different location depending on the perception of the sound.The size of the letters and its colour have to do with the clearness and loudness of the talk map of talking.They are the transcription of all the talk I can recognise. When the talk is hard to catch,such as dialects or some news in the background, then the transcription is substituted by a note [].
These footage started with a coincidence. I was in a long trip with a bunch of boredom.To lingered away the time I started shooting the view outside the window. After some years I realised I had already a lot of footages. These passengers are coming from all over china ,they have totally different background. Their talk is very heterogeneous,with different contents and different dialects. Since the privacy issue, I didn't manage to film the passengers; the landscape is also interesting, so why not?As a work which is presented in Europe,the distance of viewers to China make them get interested about it in a different way. They can get a different meaning compared with mine. On the other hand ,everything is rebuilt permanently.That also make evrfy travel is special and peculiar. To bring a feeling of travel for the viewers, I put these footages in a slightly moving state.
This piece should be exhibited in an empty dark indoor space, which has the size 7*5*3.5(metre). the movie is projected on the smaller wall (5*3.5),and 4 metres to the wall places an one－seater.
The viewer would experience a short journey on a train crossing China.the images and talks from the passengers also the noise from the train tracks build up an noisy and mixed emotional environment. somehow they would recall their own fragments from their own memories.
I hope the audience can feel, can experience, the same thing as I did or that they can recall some similarities in their memories as I those that I experienced in China. With the movement, the sound, the outside view… I want to put everything together and to make up an environment, an atmosphere of the passing time, of the pasted time. So you want people to feel your memory, to feel empathy with it. Why do you think that can be important for people, which kind of awareness do you want to create on them? I think sometimes we should just stop somewhere and look back for a bit; see what we have experienced in a past time… I look back a lot and I think is very important for me... to recognize what kind of person I really am. By making other people recall their memories, reflect on their experiences, a more straightforward thing might come to them too; a reflection moment on their own memory.
The project includes two things : A movie in which the image is divided into two parts ,on the left hand side it a looping animation of all different circles I have drawn, and the process of drawing these circles on the right side . To the side is a transparent box filled with all the papers I have drawn onto to make the animation on the film - the best circle will be placed on the top of the stack of paper.
I image myself to be a craftsman who concentrates on drawing circles for the whole of her life. She gains pleasures from doing this simple thing, keeps her esteem to this crafts, gets meaning from the circulating movement. In “News from Nowhere (1890) William Morris talks about how to get pleasure and enjoy life. For Morris doing what you want (autonomy) gives the most pleasure.
This imaginary craftsman can only exist in utopia，as the perfect hand-drawing circle can only exist in daydream. We clearly know this. As Peter Stansky said in <Utopia and Anti-Utopia> , "Utopia fiction has a way of compensating for the disappointments of everyday life".
I try to build up the utopia or anti-utopia in my work. I admire the romantic imagination in <News from Nowhere>, Morris presents a clear instance of a utopia -- no big cities, no . On the other hand, from <1984>, Orwell also brought up an equally unmistakable anti-utopia.