The Ventriloquists… Thinking Narratively | 4-19 July 2020 @ Floating Projects 2-8pm Tuesdays to Sundays
***The Ventriloquists series (每日通訊 newsletter of the exhibition, daily updates)
Technically and spatially, we look like this… …
As you draw near L3-06D, follow a soft music box-like tune.
Before you enter, on both sides of the corridor, 5 works are greeting you…
And here’s a brief introduction to the first 5 works to greet you…
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NG Sing Yiu, Brian: Clockwork City Fell in A Bloody Ending without Any Suspicion
An animated video [watch video]
Clockwork City… has recorded different contents in three worlds — the macro environment of a city, the citizens of the city, and the five senses and emotions of the citizens.Those worlds seemed like separate, but they are connected to one same destiny of a shared future. In that city, is there still any hope? Actually there already was no future, nothing but a bloody ending.
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ZHANG Zhihui: Instruction: How to Shit the Earth
A pictogram on the animation Use Instructions
The 3-minute short film, Use Instructions (1989, Guido Manuli), contains a large amount of information and personal attitudes in an artistic symbolized way. The various “butt” events seem to be parallel, but in fact, they are continually deepening with the narrative while intensifying emotions as well. The vertical and horizontal dimensions of this work are organically connected.
All the icons in my pictogram are inspired and cut-outs from the movie. Spreading out all the information, I want to illustrate the relationships more intuitively and to provoke the viewer’s deeper thinking. The complexity behind human activities lies not only in polluting the environment, but also affecting our own society, culture and humanity.
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WONG Sun-yat: A story generated by surroundings – “the window, the door, the cobble and the knife” (stickers on wall)
Read on-line [… …]
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CHOI Han-nah: Complexity of Everyday Life
A pictogram for Rybczyński’s New Book (poster on corridor)
Rybczyński’s New Book shows simultaneously what is occurring in 9 connected points of view of a place. What is supposed to be an everyday life of a man getting a new book is turned into a complex series of stories of different people. New Book expands the human limits of space and diverts from narrating solely about one main character.
This pictogram shows the carefully choreographed actions of the people. The repeated movements of different people create a sense of regularity. The climax of the work occurs when a small accident happens to people at all the nine points at the same time.
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Rachel Ricafort: The Betty Boop Snow White Slope Discourse
A pictogram on Betty Boop’s Snow White, 1933
The animation picture Betty Boop Snow White (1933) by Max Fleischer possesses a richly multifaceted oddness. The film seems barely coherent, despite its bearing the title of the all familiar tale of “Snow White”. Here and there disparate components in the pic bear similarity to the tale but its narrative discourse shows a raggedy and slippery slope. And this is the focus of my recreation.
My pictogram shows the film begins with a “three-act story structure” (left to right) with a touch of the “magical elements” whereby objects are turned malleable and personified. My pictogram then takes up each of the characters on its own course. Descriptive nouns of the overall narrative structure (e.g. Banishment, Derailment, refamiliarization etc.) are also added. The middle part of the pictogram shows what is to me the most outstanding part of the film, namely, the musical digression it goes through. The lyrics play a part on both the foreground and background, adding clever visual touches. Finally, the ending reverts back to the typical story structure; the big bad monster is faced by the characters, only for it to fail and ultimately giving it a “happy” but abrupt, and perhaps rushed ending.
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A pictogram = sight-and-sound data visualization
combining the methods of
music scoring, map-making, story-boarding, chronology, …
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And thanks once again to Madeleine Chan… whose pictogram inspires the look of the constellation we form…
Conceptually we look like this.
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