On 21 December 2022, 24 videographers from the Micro Narrative Laboratory presented 29 short pieces of videography enacting their presence, their human-tool assemblage, making experiences from fragments of attentive moments of their existence... Varied voices. Contrasting disposition. A broad range of artistic and media resources: sound driven, machine driven, automatism, animation, found footage, playful irony, traveling with a camera… Artists' writings upheld. The works will stay on-site at Floating Projects on FOUR parallel screens, 28-December 2022 to 11 January 2023.
**feature image: video still from Scarlett Ty's work
In the screening (run down)
EMOTIONS
01 KWOK Ching-ki Kiki 郭靖錡: Falling (1m44s)
02 CHENG Ying-tung 鄭映彤: Open It (1m41s)
03 Angela Fung (FUNG Lok-yi) 馮樂兒: Anxious (45s)
04 WU Tsz-ki 胡芷淇: Phantom islands 幻 島 (2m14s)
05 LI Qingmei Melody 李清美: Moments will pass: they say it's not your personal crusade (17m38s)
06 MOK Yuk-kuen Green 莫育權: Melancholic (4m01s)
MAGIC
07 Benita Leonie Liere: Untitled [generative possibilities] (52s)
08 Jaron Kuehmstedt: Untitled [generative possibilities] (2m37s)
09 CHENG Ying-tung Chelsea 鄭映彤: Through (1m09s)
10 DENG Yuanyuan 鄧緣圓: Voyage 漂流 (12m34s)
11 TSE Hiu-yin 謝曉妍: Untitled [“life is fragmented but continuous"] (2m07s)
12 WANG Shuxin Yan 汪淑欣: Untitled (1m)
13 Abby Yuen (YUEN Hiu-ching) 袁栩晴: Untitled (3m02s)
BEING/TOOL-BEING
14 MOK Yuk-kuen Green 莫育權: In Between the Shadow (2m37s)
15 Abby Yuen 袁栩晴: Untitled (3m59s)
16 Marek Gollan: Nostalgia (1m44s)
17 TY Lok Yi Scarlett 池樂兒: Untitled [on making an effort to remember] (3m)
18 KWAN Lok-tung Tate 關樂同: Untitled [on a long-distance relationship] (5m47s)
19 Luca Serdaroglu: Take a 15-second Rest (35m)
20 Longman Luk 陸朗文: A spinning 360 camera: FPS vs RPM (3m30s)
21 Jaron Kuehmstedt: OCTV – Open Circuit Television: a live video installation (documentation) (5m31s)
ASSEMBLAGE
22 Elora Ferraris: Beba CocaCola (1m53s)
23 WANG Lejian 王樂諫: Zhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly 莊周夢蝶 (4m03s)
24 TY Lok-yi Scarlett 池樂兒: An ongoing train heading to an unknown destination (3m05s)
25 TAM Chi-wing Clarie 譚智詠: Dalloway (8m01s)
26 CHAN On-tung 陳安彤: My Own Recipe (4m32s)
27 Valerie Mak: On the Road (5m20s)
28 WANG Lejian 王樂諫: Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, a found footage exercise (3m20s)
29 Martha Lai 黎苡臻: Untitled [The drunken cat 醉貓] (55s)
ARTISTS’ STATEMENTS
Edited and abbreviated by Linda C.H. Lai
EMOTIONS
KWOK Ching-ki Kiki 郭靖錡: Falling (1m44s)
This video is about anxiousness. I wanted to convey the emotion without showing any faces, and one way to achieve that is to portray my point of view. Feeling dizzy. Disoriented. I keep falling, into the dark… I chose not to include sound as I feel silence is a powerful.
CHENG Ying-tung 鄭映彤: Open It (1m41s)
I have always wondered what’s inside of me. If I’m controlling myself, who’s controlling me? The fact is I feel so separated from what’s inside of me. … … I put my phone inside a box and started shooting and shaking. I thought of Schrödinger's cat while I am being the manipulator outside the box. What’s inside is full of possibilities but I won’t know if the cat is alive or it’s dead until I opened the box. I thought of parallel time and space. … This video allows me to enter the mind of the objects inside the box. I started to wonder what if I am the one who’s inside the box. Then, who’s out there? Am I the manipulator? I doubted.
Angela Fung (FUNG Lok-yi) 馮樂兒: Anxious (45s)
What am I scared in my life? Insects? Interpersonal relation? Solitude?
Persistence of vision refers to the optical illusion when an object does not cease for
some time after the rays of light that enter our eyes. This, to me, is the strongest forms of anxiety…
Wu Tsz-ki 胡芷淇: Phantom islands 幻 島 (2m14s)
Based on three poems by young local writer Cheung Ngan-wah 張雁華（署名：茶渣）
1. 垂釣 (fishing) | 2. 車輪 (wheels)｜3. 寫生 (life-drawing三、寫生
LI Qingmei Melody李清美: Moments will pass: they say it's not your personal crusade (17m38s)
Bodies exist as metaphors, and metaphors as bodies to live by.
Contain the container, invade the invader, consume the consumer. … Moments will pass.
The essay film is part of a series of artworks comprising sculptural paintings and moving images that meditates time, space, materials, and thoughts that will only survive in metaphors.
MOK Yuk-kuen Green 莫育權: Melancholic (4m01s)
As i saw the red flags flying in the sky, I was reminded of the song 明天會更好 (Tomorrow will be Better). The song, written in 1985, was to wish for Hong Kong a better tomorrow. Forty years have almost passed. Has Hong Kong turned better? The shooting location was a place where I grew up since I was a child. The emotion is very complicated when seeing some flags occupying this familiar spot. Would different people respond differently due to their experiences? The sight, together with the song invoked, speaks irony to me. In this piece, I also bring in elements that invoke the city’s golden age for me.
video still from the work of Melody Li
MAGIC
Benita Leonie Liere: Untitled [generative possibilities] (52s)
This video is comedic, but that was not in my mind when I started to construct the work. It repeats the same motif, reverses the sound of a violin string being plucked, and yet varies in visual rhythm in utmost economy. Shoes, box, shoes, box, shoes, box – no, wait! Orchestra. Shoes, no, violin. And violin again? Does this count as a Kuleshov effect?
Jaron Kuehmstedt: Untitled [generative possibilities] (2m37s)
In previous exercises, I dealt with my relationship with the city, and how I situated myself in it. In this piece, I combine those elements to recreate the juxtaposition of city, the man made social-concrete-organism, and nature. Through reoccurrence and repetition, I recreate the city’s never-ending working, people commuting, traveling and seeing the same sights over and over again. The notion of reoccurrence and repetition happens in nature as well across the seasons -- growth, decomposition and so on. But I have no intention to merge nature with the urban.
CHENG Ying-tung Chelsea 鄭映彤: Through (1m09s)
This video is the way I looked at myself and what surrounds me. It seeks to combine the outer and the inner world whereas I find myself living in between.
I was walking somewhere near the peaceful, familiar Cheung Chau pier. That’s my home.
People pass by. I don’t know if they see me. I keep walking, making coffee and walking. …
DENG Yuanyuan 鄧緣圓: Voyage 漂流 (12m34s)
She walks from the city into wilderness. The packs of monkeys establish a nation of their own. Nobody knows when she crosses the border into an uncharted territory. We attempt to break the boundary between the past and the present, the city and nature. In the public shelters, gods are worshiped; on damp rainy nights, fish from mythical tales passes by. In thunders and lightning, the past and the present intertwine, and time falls in a loop. The candles were extinguished. And time runs over time. We walk barefoot in time, memory, the earth, and the air. …
TSE Hiu-yin 謝曉妍: Untitled [“life is fragmented but continuous”] (2m07s)
I have learned to observe the world. We are all separated, each on an island of our own. We are on the train, and also we are off the train. A Chinese saying goes: you’re watching the scenery, those watching the scenery are watching you.” (你在看風景,看風景的人在看你) Life is fragmented and continuous. … We choose to keep something and let something go. Change is the only constant. I am part of the landscapes, and I am also a wayfarer.
WANG Shuxin Yan 汪淑欣: Untitled (1m)
This video was made with 40 minutes of time-lapse video condensed into one minute. It captures 40 minutes of night time activities of the occupants across the street from my living room window.
Due to my iritis, the sight of bright lights causes my eyes to wince. But observing subtle distant views also allows me to exercise my eyesight simultaneously. At night, the lights of each house in the building turn on and off. Through a montage method, I created a rhythm with found sounds. …
Sound reference:
https://freesound.org/people/jrssandoval/sounds/67173/
https://freesound.org/people/temawas/sounds/256846/
https://freesound.org/people/o_ciz/sounds/475477/
Abby Yuen (YUEN Hiu-ching) 袁栩晴: Untitled (3m02s)
This work combines four existing pieces of videography. As I fitted the fragments together, I noticed similarities in the footage. For example, there is a lot of moving towards an object, extreme close-up shots, blurred unintelligible shots, jolting camera movement. I then added the sounds from the same footages. The choppiness and the repetitiveness of the mechanical sounds and pure tone, when pieced together, create a rhythm. … It seems to exaggerate the movement even more, enticing me to play with the haptic jolt even more …
video still from the work of CHAN On-tung
BEING/TOOL-BEING
MOK Yuk-kuen Green 莫育權: In Between the Shadow (2m37s)
When I walk alone on the street in the city, especially at midnight, I become quite aware of the shadows and lights projected by the headlights of vehicles on the wall of a building. It is quite like a moving lantern, like shadow plays and dreams. One night, when I passed by the Flower Market in Prince Edward, a very long black cloth hanging onto the wall caught my attention…
Abby Yuen 袁栩晴: Untitled (3m59s)
I have been experimenting with my semi-analogue synthesiser to make drone music. In this piece, I used sound as the point of departure to inform the video. An element of improvisation as well as thoughtful patching is required when making the sound track using the synthesiser, as the knobs and patch connections are very sensitive and it could make unpredictable sounds as a result. …I wanted the video to follow the slow progression of sound while exploring interesting textures. I wanted to highlight the duality of the high and low tones you can hear in the piece and the evolving timbre. I applied overlaying and additive/colour settings to experiment.
Marek Gollan: Nostalgia (1m44s)
My video deals with the appropriation, recontextualization and “loss” of personal
videographed memories in the time of digital videography and social media. My video shows the journey of a smartphone video as it gets compressed and resized again and again by the process of sharing it using various social media platforms. The video was sent and then sent back again using the messaging apps Whatsapp and Telegram as well as uploaded and downloaded again on the image/video sharing platforms Instagram and Youtube. In total, the video was “remade” 15 times. As a maker, I gave up control over my source file to let the black box data-saving algorithms of the platforms degrade my video with each step of the process.
TY Lok Yi Scarlett 池樂兒: Untitled [on making an effort to remember] (3m)
When reviewing my first two videographic exercises, I started to notice the anxiety or irritable feelings emerging I was not aware of. I thought I was just putting together footage from my street wandering and the words and phrases that came to my mind in that process. With a background in animation, I built flickering into my visual grammar. In this piece, I think more about magic or surprise viewers may experience through my auto-writing performance. Printing enacts the repetition of words which in turn evoke emotions. I connect the writing process to that of printing. In that same process, my emotions unfold.
KWAN Lok-tung Tate 關樂同: Untitled [on a long-distance relationship] (5m47s)
This final work is heavily influenced by my experience of a long-distance relationship, where physical intimacies are replaced by that of the digital, and delays and distortions in electronic transmission become some very real and integral parts of my life. …I was inspired by the use of electronic noise in the Vasulkas’ video works; I decided to work with video and audio feedback loops on the online conferencing software Zoom, to explore delays in digital video communication. In a project about the repetitions of images and sounds, each feedback loop and delay are individual, unable to replicate and difficult to manipulate. Even though it is a work about the lack of materiality of touch in the digital space, it is in this process that I experienced the materiality of video directly and felt closer to the digital.
Luca Serdaroglu: Take a 15-second Rest (35m)
This piece is composed with four earlier exercises, and nothing but just that material. I started editing with no particular goal in mind; I picked small clips from each video and looped together with their respective sound bites. The clip, with the sound bite ”take a fifteen second rest,” was the one used most, or the clip that became the most dominant. That clip spoke to me, because it corresponded with my life here in Hong Kong, which is often quite restless.
Longman Luk 陸朗文: A spinning 360 camera: FPS vs RPM (3m30s)
Consumer-level 360 cameras typically stitch images captured by 2 fisheye lenses. The footage can be reframed into a fixed aspect ratio such as 16:9 by assigning a viewing angle. With the internal microphone, some cameras may even restore a somewhat believable binaural sound field. What happens if I ask the camera to lock onto a specific angle while spinning it with a machine? Under what circumstances will it generate a stable audio/visual image? If it succeeds to highlight some physical/ computational artefacts, can I further exploit them?
Jaron Kuehmstedt: OCTV – Open Circuit Television: a live video installation (documentation) (5m31s)
OCTV, or Open-Circuit Television is a play on the term CCTV commonly used for video
surveillance. CCTV, or closed-circuit television, is meant to operate in a closed system only
transmitting to a single or a small set of monitors within this system. Drawing from my continuous examination of my own relation to the city and the public realm and the way I as an individual appear within this realm, the video installation aims to address issues of appearance and individualization. …This work breaks a closed circuit open, manipulating the live video signal coming from the camera to remove any features that could identify persons as who they are. Instead, the features are replaced with procedurally generated static noise, an anonymous image. The noise generation is triggered by motion within the frame to visualize the physicality of the process, highlighting the working of the technology and how it is not acting independently of us but is very much in constant conversation with us.
video still: from the work of Jaron Kuehmstedt
ASSEMBLAGE
Elora Ferraris: Beba CocaCola (1m53s)
Using automatic writing to come up with potential routes to take for this project, I’ve noticed the recurring word ‘concrete’. I took a glance at all 5 previous exercises of mine and read through the feedback. It was then and there that two words popped up in my mind: Concrete Poetry. My group had tackled the concept of Concrete Video, so why not create something along those lines? The beauty behind concrete poetry is the usage of individual non-linguistic elements, colours and typefaces to create a poem wherein its visual quality is what makes it stand out. It incorporates visual, verbal and even sonic elements, a feature also alive in Robert Cahen’s approach to videos. I want to try out “concrete video” myself. I happened to have stumbled upon a particularly striking poem by Décio Pignatari titled “Beba Coca Cola,” thus this found footage exercise with vintage Coca Cola TV ads.
WANG Lejian 王樂諫: Zhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly 莊周夢蝶 (4m03s)
In this work, I play with the gaze and its “authority” by reverting it back onto myself as the image-maker. This imagined return-gaze reigns through the entire video: beautiful female faces, usually the object of gaze, “look” at the camera throughout. I merge the internalization of the viewer with the exteriorization of the character? I begin to see myself to be the butterfly in Zhuangzi’s dream: it comes from “nothing,” and only he knows. The actual me comes from the image of me. Finishing a video is like waking up from a dream.
TY Lok-yi Scarlett 池樂兒: An ongoing train heading to an unknown destination (3m05s)
A lot of the material used in this piece was not intended, but the unused footage I shot during the semester, with the assumption that part of it would be of use someday. So, my exercise here it to search for connections and hidden thoughts in my old footage, not shot with any specific theme in mind. Looking for possible combinations and compositions, I treat imageries as shapes and textures. My university life almost ends, and I will graduate in the next few months. It is a mixed feeling, sometimes I wish there are rules to follow but sometimes I want to say no to everything and reject everyone. An unknown path may mean infinite opportunities or being lost.
TAM Chi-wing Clarie 譚智詠: Dalloway (8m01s)
This video’s title derives from the name of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway [1925]. To me, imaginations are more realistic than reality. It is in my mind where I fight off anxiety, boredom, problems, thoughts on someone, and so on. My moods in facing everyday life drive my behaviours. The word Dalloway subtly means “stream-of-consciousness narrative,” which comes close to the state of “fluctuation” in this work -- I want to explore the fragmented and fluid nature of time through a single-day documentary, intercepted by flashbacks and intertwining strands of moods and happenings.
CHAN On-tung 陳安彤: My Own Recipe (4m32s)
To understand and uncover the enchanting world, it is our consciousness that matters rather than having the thought, “I have to observe something else today.” This concluding exercise of mine comprises a 3-step recipe of “baking” me out. In the first step, I collected bunches of “me” from people around me, have them sending me footages they’ve got recording me in daily life. They were not forced to record me with any particular purpose, it is about when their consciousness directs their attention on me. Perhaps because they know me as friends, or I do things funny… In the second steps, I collected footages from my phones and my small old camera which I brought with myself every day. I mixed these videos until a point where audience cannot recognize the difference between step 1 and 2. Step 3 is a totally new video, which is my interpretation of the many elements that speak of my consciousness, and how I experience the world.
Reference:
Music: New Light - John Mayer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ055hHdxbE
Valerie Mak: On the Road (5m20s)
By combining the footage I have collected throughout the years from different journeys, with people's conversations on their dogmas in life that I eavesdropped on, or involved in, the video presents the randomness in our enlightened moments throughout our life.
WANG Lejian 王樂諫: Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, a found footage exercise (3m20s)
This is a found footage exercise using the animation picture Perfect Blue, as well as the documentary (Lectures by Satoshi Kon) on the film. I also build into this work fragments of my own video exercise. The result: reality dissipates and transforms… The layers within the work could be the layers of observation, attention, emotions, thoughts and reflections, and finally my very existence.
Reference:
Kon, S. (1997). Perfect Blue. Madhouse.
Kon, S. (2007). Lectures by Satoshi Kon (R. Nagai, Interviewer). https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhY7TqBpvLhhREJDo25oKNexc2s0mqwOl
Wang, L. (2022). ve05_Wang_Lejian [Video].
Martha Lai 黎苡臻: Untitled [The drunken cat 醉貓] (55s)
I learnt that when creating experimental videos, there could be a mismatch in sound and image, and multiple frames overlapping. In this video, I want to turn an unpleasant moment into something pleasant. To my quotidian frustrations, I added the instrumental version of a nursery rhyme “If You're Happy and You Know It." I added alcohol and the image of a cat to express a Chinese term「醉貓」(the drunken cat). It refers to people who got drunk and acted abnormally, accompanied by distorted music, which expresses my frustration towards the long period of time involved in cutting a coconut.
Music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3WUghQDbiw
video still from the work of Elora Ferraris
END OF SCREENING LIST
