Caroline Leaf’s The Street shows montage at work by abolishing the shot-to-shot editing system of continuity. Guido Manuli’s Use Instructions is a series of synecdoche through which we are dragged down to hell to the final destruction of Earth. Both animation pictures play with the 3-act structure dramatic conventions. Two narrative pictograms augment what is just beneath the surface of pleasing imaging. 動畫的敘事法花枝招展,起承轉合是借用觀眾熟識的架構安置觀眾,看真是掩眼法。《街道》以水彩的流動取締了傳統分鏡的敘事法,鏡頭接合的文法銷毀,蒙太奇的效果卻豐盈漲滿,記憶的行動成了一場戲。《用家指南》的舉寓令人捧腹大笑,狂笑後往未來看,是希望的滅絕,地球成了渣滓糞便,是誰開始的超級玩笑?
Narrative pictograms’ view on two kinds of time and space — the brothel as chronotope, timeless space (Flowers of Shanghai), and nested realities in the virtual worlds of the mind as dreamwork (Inception) — presented at Ventriloquists…Thinking Narratively, 4-19 July 2020. 如果敘事法的性質是時空的呈現以至再組織,進而擴展我們對存在的認知,那麼敘述圖形是另一種實驗性的創作,就是動用跨媒的資源去尋找語言或純影音未能盡興的展陳。《潛行凶間》和《海上花》是兩個截然不同的時空構圖;前者踏進夢的潛意識的禁地,化之為慾望的戲劇舞台,後者則專注現象學的濃密經營,時間一點一滴,一舉手一投足,吃喝閒話家常,紛陳世事,時間停留在這裡、此刻,摺疊勾連,並不向前。
The pictogram method was applied to the reading and reconstructing of various commercial heats, including the pre-Disney 1933 animation classic on Snow White and Pandora’s Box featuring Stephen Chow, resulting in various works, three of them shown at the exhibition The Ventriloquists…Thinking Narratively (4-19 July 2020) at Floating Projects. 《腹語系:微敘思考》展場中,有三個圖形轉化的作品,選擇了兩個商業收益叫好的作品 — 迪士尼《白雪公主》面世前,費里沙創作的黑白動畫,還有周星馳的《西遊記之月光寶盒》。
More pictograms representing two experimental films by Zbigniew Rybczynski, New Book (1975) and Tango (1981), by 3 artists at the show Ventriloquists…Thinking Narratively (4-19 July 2020). A stretched vocabulary of narrativity. Multi-linearity, simultaneity, superimposition, convergence of trajectories, generative loops. 更多的圖形敘事解構,伸展了的敘事語彙。多向多線發展。共時性。重疊。弧度的結點、匯合。衍生式的循環。張開現實的奧秘。
Like Calvino’s The Invisible Cities, Oulipo founder Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (Exercises in Style) is another example of generative literature transmediated as pictograms. Artist Madeleine Chan takes up 5 episodes of the work. After a generative principle, she produces 5 iterative views of the same event as pictograms, stretching Queneau’s textual play in written words.
A pictogram is a form of knowledge; a pictogram that reconstructs another existing work is the stretching of the epistemological potential of a work. In the pictogram exercises presented at “The Ventriloquists … Thinking Narratively,” the reading and re-reading of Calvino’s The Invisible Cities combines the methods of music scoring, cartography, story-boarding and chronology-making, each with its own conceptual emphasis in presenting pictures of realities. Here, one pictogram offers glimpse of these concepts. 解構式的圖形是知識的具體表現;重塑已存在的作品的圖形是對現有作品的知識能量的擴展,同時也是對班雅明的「作者作為生產者」的想法的一種回應,關注個別的作如何站立於一個時代的技術生產當中。這裡以一個創作為例。
Two artists read YU Hua’s novella World List Mists (1988) and translate it analytically and structurally into a pictogram form to augment textures of sentiments and narrative integrity, maximizing a fatal body of cybernetics through methods of scoring, cartography, chronology and storyboarding. 兩個圖像作品,兩個創作者對余華的《世事如煙》的轉化閱讀,呈現敘事性如何把哀愁、絕望化為結構,點對點的連線,網絡的展現,把個人的「命運」背後的人為操控層層展露。
Three works interpret American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, each visualizing a unique aspect of the film. 三個圖像,結構細節形骸有別,都是對準美國前衛名作《午間的網陣》,剖開不同層面的內部物質真相。
Connecting childhood: yours, mine and theirs. Fishing with Popo (2011) by Lilian Fu is among the artist-animator’s first experiments with documentary animation. Several young artists have responded… Two pictograms on this work, by William Phuong and Louise Chan, exhibited at The Ventriloquists…Thinking Narratively, 4-17 July 2020, are transmedia extension of Fu’s animated memories of her grandma.
Four works on a monitor… collage, montage, still and moving. Restless assertions. Inquisitive hypothesis… 動動象。打開動畫。自言自語。若有所失。