Why is narrativity a relevant artistic concept in a data-driven milieu? An exhibition with 35 works speak — as videos, photomontage, installation, pictograms, creative writing and game plans, by BA students at the School of Creative Media. The Ventriloquists 2021.《腹語系。微敘思考。2021》繼續開發陳述的藝術:層層推理。逐步走,慢慢說,用豐盈的小節。
The pictograms for this 101 moving image classic show more than just the exemplary precision of continuity editing and a classical 3-act structure in plotting. These pictograms function as analytical tools to show how the intensifying bond between the boy and the balloon evolves; to superimpose the 1955-56 location of the film Red Balloon onto the contemporary map of Paris, … and to single out the swerving energies and roughening emotions of the story world in mood-board like representation.《紅氣球》是學過活動影像拍攝的入門經典,或許是這樣,我們可能錯過了敘事藝術上的微細質感。氣球於小孩的動人關係不用質疑了,可是甚麼叫我們感動?這裡四個圖形分析,從唯物的層面揭示創作者的藝術心思,著我們不再輕易走漏眼。
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。
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.
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。
The Hand comes in from everywhere. It interrupts, commands, dominates…; it is omnipresent, irresistible, almighty, dressed and decorated nonetheless mercilessly brutal.. Such is the condition of an artist who wakes up one morning to find his normal routine totally ruled invalid. 木偶藝術小子一覺醒來,伸伸懶腰又期待著新一天的開始。怎知道一夜間世界變透了。一隻無名的手,由溫柔禮待到強權粗暴,無處不在,無孔不入。
Technically, spatially and conceptually, “The Ventriloquists…Thinking Narratively” looks like this… Here’s the introduction of the first FIVE works in the corridor outside Floating Projects. 《腹語系》先介紹據點門前長廊的5件作品。往後續一介紹。