Mystic River:some debris and a poet
The Hollywood movie Who Is the Black Dahlia? came to life at Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, where a dead body was found in a water tank. “In the surveillance footage, Elisa Lam jumped in and out of the elevator, gesturing to some mysterious individual outside the elevator that seemed to be playing hide-and-seek with someone…” The surveillance footage on YouTube was sensational for a while. A long shot by a surveillance camera set our (or the Netizens’ or police and detectives’) imagination wild, speculating with the monotonous camera images: Who was the murderer? What happened exactly then? Before the case is solved, except for the ones involved, only God knows what the truth is. There is a saying in Taiwanese, “God sees what you’re doing.” Yet, in the American society where the rule of law is taken seriously, it is not hard to picture how low the probability of the authority turning to some mystic power for cracking the case is. In the contemporary society after myths busted, do people still believe in God? Can surveillance cameras possibly replace this (or several) unscientific Deity(-ies)? Nonetheless, supernatural faith has given way to technology nowadays. In the modern society where the technology of Internet is highly developed, tens of thousands surveillance cameras are deployed to each and every corner in the city or in the Nature, concealed up and down and becoming yet another nature. It is as if we (human, non-human, and manmade objects) were situated in Truman’s World. The scene in the famous novel 1984 published by George Orwell almost 70 years ago seems like a Deja Vu today thanks to technology. Another form of Big Brother is watching over you.
In this work, however, compared to the truth-seeking nature of surveillance cameras, what I am more concerned about are the ocean of images produced by relentless and anxious surveillance cameras in every instant. Where do they go? Who is watching? When are they being watched? What does that mean? These poor images enter the world of humanity, yet rarely into the sight of men. They are only pulled out when some specific event happens. Surveillance cameras that are fixed in position and in cut are recording specific venues and corners, producing banal images over and over again like our daily lives. Or, these images are like the empty shot in a film. Spiritually speaking, they are without any meaning or value in most of the time. In terms of materiality, they cannot be any poorer as they are at the bottom of the image hierarchy. However, they are still hegemonic in the sense of surveillance. There comes a paradox where the unrefined image owns hegemony, nevertheless. Though I consider them communist most of the time, where are they if they are not in the context of capitalism? Most of the images are stored temporarily before discarded (deleted). Where are these images discarded to? Does ecology exist in the virtual world or not? Hypothetically speaking, if we could recycle and reuse these images, what can we do with them? |
Based on the aforementioned thinking, I coordinated with the ocean of surveillance camera images to produce the first work: the real-time images produced by hundreds of cameras as materials, program-coding to reallocate images as a kind of new image deployment and strategy. Should the complete image be defined as a superiority and privilege in a system, “radical fragmentation” may perhaps be symbolized an action. Hence, image loses its structure and disintegrates its basis for interpretation. Is it true, however? Imagine that one digital image shredder produces fragments and debris from the trash bin. What meaning could it possibly be given? Thus, I coordinated AI robots to engage a poetic writing with the edited and broken images. The intertext of poem and image yields the second work: as I browse all these images collected from thousands of surveillance cameras, I felt as if my mind is staring at the void, and that I have become the surveillance camera myself without any judgement whatsoever.*1 Then, I thought, who can be the judgement of that if a judgement is needed? I wonder how AI robots interpret these broken images. It is like when the abstract painting was introduced to this world, people found it uncomfortable because they did not have any prior aesthetic experience as reference. Also, how much more can intelligent robots understand? For which what kind of interpretation can they provide? What do fragments and debris of images symbolize to AIs? Will AI work like humans, engaging all sorts of apophenia of images based on Gestalt Psychology? Or, will they follow their psychological nature, giving images positive or evil projection and recognition? How many databases can Big Data provide AIs for reference? Is the growing environment of AIs (the Big Data fed to AIs) truly the key to its recognition basis? Can AIs be free from Big Data and autonomously become an exception in the future?
I am not done with questions yet. It took less than two seconds for my partner AI to write a poem for the post-coding image debris. Here, the vision (the eyes of the audience as well as those of the AI robot) or program (the coded eyes) fails to capture a complete image, unable to fill in the blank, producing debris of images that grant the mind (of human or non-human) no reference at all. The anxious thalamus keeps forcing the computation and apophenia on these abstract images, which turns out to be nothing more than a futile effort or something banal. They ceaselessly derive and superimpose, interconnecting and interweaving with each other. Except for the broken boundary, there is nothing but the broken boundary itself. Robots write poems in human language for humans to read. Yet, the poem is never readable to humans. *The images produced in this exhibition will not be stored in the cloud, but perhaps in the river of virtual reality already. |
Biography
Melmel Chen (b.1984 Taiwan) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in London.
Over the last five years, her artistic research has been focused primarily on investigation of subject and object relationship in terms of philosophical and Biopolitical spectacle in relation to modernity and urban society, mainly through the mediums ranging from image, photography, sculpture, and (site-specific) installation. She is interested in how human observes and receives reality and non-reality, and how human sees and categorises things indifferent culture, history, and society.
EDUCATION
2015-2017 University of London, Goldsmiths college. MFA Fine Art.
2002 - 2007 National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.
Industrial & Commercial Design Department - Commercial Design pathway
GROUP EXHIBITION
2018 Herbal Urbanism, Beitou III Urban Herbalism and the Cartography of Deities, Hon-
gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
2018 Asus Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan
2018 Studio Stupin, Taipei Art Village, Taipei, Taiwan
2017 Refuse, Worn, Open Call, Online Gallery, Noway
2017 Eden, Group Show, Participate Contemporary Artspace, London, UK
2017 Goldsmiths Fine Art Degree Show, London, UK
2016 Goldsmiths Fine Art Interim Show, London, UK
2015 Slippery, hARTslane Gallery, London, UK
RESIDENCY
2017 Studio Stupin, Taipei, Taiwan
2017 Joya Art Residency,Alicante, Spain
2017 Marz Barn, UK
Over the last five years, her artistic research has been focused primarily on investigation of subject and object relationship in terms of philosophical and Biopolitical spectacle in relation to modernity and urban society, mainly through the mediums ranging from image, photography, sculpture, and (site-specific) installation. She is interested in how human observes and receives reality and non-reality, and how human sees and categorises things indifferent culture, history, and society.
EDUCATION
2015-2017 University of London, Goldsmiths college. MFA Fine Art.
2002 - 2007 National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.
Industrial & Commercial Design Department - Commercial Design pathway
GROUP EXHIBITION
2018 Herbal Urbanism, Beitou III Urban Herbalism and the Cartography of Deities, Hon-
gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
2018 Asus Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan
2018 Studio Stupin, Taipei Art Village, Taipei, Taiwan
2017 Refuse, Worn, Open Call, Online Gallery, Noway
2017 Eden, Group Show, Participate Contemporary Artspace, London, UK
2017 Goldsmiths Fine Art Degree Show, London, UK
2016 Goldsmiths Fine Art Interim Show, London, UK
2015 Slippery, hARTslane Gallery, London, UK
RESIDENCY
2017 Studio Stupin, Taipei, Taiwan
2017 Joya Art Residency,Alicante, Spain
2017 Marz Barn, UK