*Due to unforeseen family needs, Professor Mary Flanagan will not be able to come to Hong Kong as planned. Regretfully we have to cancel her Lecture/Workshop today (2:00-3:30pm).
*Please still join us for the Artists’ Forum 4:00-6:30pm as most of the artists will be present for this event and will do a guided tour themselves.
*Today is the LAST DAY of our exhibition. WE SHALL CLOSE AT 8:00pm today instead of 10:00pm for logistic reasons. Apologies to all visitors if you have planned to come after 8:00pm.
MORE VIEWS FROM THE EXHIBITION:
Below please see more images from the exhibition. (For last posting of image, click here…)
Winnie Soon and Helen Pritchard’s jsut code shares secrets with those who have the right communication tools [below]
Enrica Ho’s Le Montage de l’émotion recodes words into colors to form take-away paintings [below]
‘Generative Thinking in Contemporary Art and Creative Writing’ / Dr. Linda C.H. LAI / 2:00-4:00pm @ Video Shooting Studio, 2M/F, Youth Square
衍生性思考：當代藝術與創意寫作中的軌跡 / 黎肖嫻
‘Generative thinking’ has many names.
In biology, morphology, self-multiplication…
In mathematics, series formation…
In music, serialism…
In cybernetics, emergence, from single unit to complex structure…
In computing, algorithm
In art, rule-based creativity
This is a workshop in which participants apply ‘generative thinking’ to making individual and collective art pieces on the spot, experience computational thinking in a game. The activities will be accompanied by a short presentation of major art works in modern and contemporary art that manifest generative thinking.
Zoie So’s Mediated Facial welcomes visitors at the entrance of Youth Square with a warm-up exercise on computed processes without a computer… [below]
2 high-views of the Gestus set of 15 moving-image gestures by Hector Rodriguez… [below]
Justin Wong turns his comics library into an animation of combinatorial narrative for a City Forum on HK politics… [below]
Linda Lai and Gary Ng’s Scriptorium tests the precarious nature of the assembly line… [below]
2 Lectures on computational thinking, cinema, and creativity on January 22, 2011
Dr. Kenny Chow (HK Polytechnic University – School of Design) discussed the multifarious manifestation of computational thinking in “Cognition, Computation, and Creativity” … [below]
Dr. Hector Rodriguez (Associate Dean of City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media) discussed the necessity of computation to form an archive in his creative critique of the history of cinema in “Cinema, Gesture, and Computation”… [below]
Moment from moments // WONG Chun-hoi王鎮海 / 5m / 2010
Take a look at old photos buried for decades under your bed. Old on the surface, young on the skin. Human growth, plant growth. Human becomes moody. Plants become woody. What makes a moment that moment was not the content itself but its materiality. A few lived moments of mine re-generate a new moment of me, intimately, over the light box, or else they would never have the chance to overlap and dissolve into each other. By the way, how long is a moment?
β // Kenji WONG 王偉健 / 15m / 2010
β is based on the artist’s research of light-box advertisements along the Tsuen Wan Line of the Mass Transit Railway (MTR). The method was to capture all light-box advertisements at every station on 23rd February 2010. The result was 572 photos turned into a 15-minute slideshow in video form.
Map of Problematique // WONG Fuk-kuen 黃福權 / 1m 45s / 2010
This work creates rhythm by regulating the motion of passers-by on the street from footage I collected in Fan Ling. I also want to explore how still and moving images work together to generate musical sense. Audience may consider this an MV, but actually I am re-writing the song Map of the Problematique by MUSE with my images.
I narrate the O // Iriz YUEN 袁雅詠 / 10m 15s / 2010
Listen. Descriptions. Ocean.
Let literature narrates the walk towards the sea.
Stories are usually read silently from a book with picture illustrations. This time, there is only my voice speaking words. Let’s see what kind of a story audience will get. I’d like to discover something about seeing and hearing.
Fish 1/2 // KWOK Chui-han Bao 郭翠嫻 / 2m 42s / 2010
One place, One fish. This work is about a fish. It moves in and out of the camera frame randomly. I use the footage to generate a video piece with some hidden rules that instruct me how to organize the shots. Look for the logic behind.
Wide Rothko // Vasco PAIVA / 10m / 2008
Using footage and audio recordings made in Hong Kong and in several locations in the Chinese province of Yunnan, Wide Rothko creates a new form of visualization exploring the relations between abstraction and figurative imagery.
Loss of footage: an invisible consciousness // Keith WONG 黃柏麒 / 5m / 2010
I lost my computer in March 2010, together with it all my video footage in the hard disk. Afterwards, I painstakingly sorted out all possible sources to redeem whatever I could – some final drafts, scratched DV tapes, and clips in secondary storage systems as well as those sent via e-mail. So here is the new story I weaved with the fragments at hand. I seem to discover an invisible consciousness hidden in my visual language, things I cannot talk about in my daily life.
Explosion // Alan KWAN 關子維 / 6m 50s / 2010
There are 3 explosion footages in extreme slow motion. Using Max/MSP/Jitter, I created the effect of two explosion clouds of different colors merging to form a black one. I imagine myself doing what the capitalists do – to act as a manipulator and design images whereby real meanings and nature of things are distorted. Ironically, with the music (Dream by John Cage) and color, the explosion, originally a lethal and terrible thing, becomes poetry or a painting with spreading ink. I have also removed the context: everything except the explosion clouds has been deleted from the scene. I substitute the pleasure of seeing for the contemplation on the horror of violence. But isn’t that what advertising does?
Communication // Winnie CHUNG 仲浩甄 / 4m / 2010
This work questions the normal practice of communication. We receive messages systematically through reading and listening. What would become of communication if what we hear is not what we see?
Live show is(n’t) showing live // Jolene MOK 莫頌靈 / 5m 2s / 2010
This short video plays with the notion of what is and what is not a LIVE SHOW… To me a videographer, a ‘live show’ begins with the moment I press the record button and ends when I press it again, whereas in the editing process, there is hardly any live moments as I show the record of records, and present the presence of the completed present.
Workshop: ‘GENERATIVE ILLUSTRATION’ 衍生漫畫 / Mr. Justin WONG 黃照達
16:00-18:00pm / Video Shooting Studio, 2M/F, Youth Square, Chaiwan
Cutting and pasting have become familiar commands used on the computer in everyday life. This workshop will take the action of “cut and paste” back to its origin and explore how we can draw from a database of graphics to create new artworks. Using graphics from his comics, Justin Wong will lead workshops attendees in creating their own comics by following a simple direction that he uses whilst creating: selection, cutting and pasting. This workshop aims at revealing the infinite possibilities of using database-driven creative methods.
Dr. Hector Rodriguez: ‘Cinema, Gesture, Computation’
19th century motion studies and early silent films documented and displayed gesture as such, often against neutral or dark backgrounds. They isolated gesture from any spatial or temporal location and focused attention on its intrinsic kinetic properties. The original vocation of cinema was the purification, analysis, and exhibition of gesture. Its subject matter often consisted of those repetitive body motions that philosopher Henri Bergson regarded as the essence of comedy. The subsequent rise of Hollywood narrative cinema, however, marginalized this gestural obsession. As character-driven story-telling came to dominate mainstream films, the purity of gesture was subordinated to narrative structure. This talk argues for a return to gesture as the fundamental aspiration of cinema.
Dr. Kenny Chow: ‘Cognition, Computation, and Creativity’
Humans create computers. Can computers think like a human? Can computers create artifacts like what humans do? When we make things with computers, where does creativity lie? in humans or computers? Have computers made us think like a computer? Is it a paradox?
SCREENING I: “Video as Writing Machines” / January 22, 2010 (Saturday) / 17:30-18:40 / Y-Studio
a video program from an open call for works on image-text dialogue and generative process (Curated by Linda Lai)
Broken machine / Carla CHAN陳好彩 / 3 m / 2010
We type what we think. Internet communication makes us type more and more. Typing makes sound, but as we type we lose the sound of our actual speech. I therefore created the Broken Machine: direct contact with people is broken, our voice is broken.
Untitled (Traces) / Vasco PAIVA / 5m 37s / 2010
Traces made in the water by the passage of a boat are treated by an algorithm that multiplies and overlaps the recorded footage. The result is an abstract visualization whereby the graphical properties of water dilute our perception of linear perspective.
Won’t be shy anymore / Step AU區詠欣 / 1m 59s / 2010
In the form of a poem hidden in a postcard, the artist speaks out her love and pain to her lost children.
Feeding the wolf / Step AU 區詠欣 / 1m 53s / 2010
I framed my mind onto a window. Simply, I was just daydreaming in class.”
Flowpoints: Kiss / Hector RODRIGUEZ 羅海德 / 8m / 2010
This is an experimental animation that deconstructs Andy Warhol’s movie Kissusing a motion tracking software the artist designed. The software computes and analyzes the micro-movements of the body in the original film. The resulting images represent motions rather than figures. The sound synthesis technique is a variant of the same algorithm that generates the images.
One strange case, two strange people / Doris POON潘韻怡/ 21m / 2009
This work shows two persons’ dialogue as a kind of “time image” (Deleuze). The lack of clean logical linearity in the conversation provides viewers with much room for interpretation. In this work, time is not objective. Each viewer forms his/ her own sense of time. I am curious about how viewers construct time with my video.
Ignore the passage of time, the varying of circumstances, and the speaker. I explore meanings by stepping backward to revisit the ‘origin’ of the text. I reduce the content to something “always true.”
Stutterer / Alan KWAN 關子維 / 7m 51s / 2010
Kwan Tsz-wai is a stutterer. Instructed by her doctor, she puts a speed-altering device on her mouth and looks forward to the day the treatment is completed so that she can speak normally and fluently.
Thickness of time / LI Yi-fung 李倚風 / 3m 50s / 2010
Normally, a new shot supercedes the previous one. My piece does the opposite. All shots that have appeared will stay while new ones are laid over them – with a 10-second delay. This is a thick description of time. Actually, there is thickness in time and distance in between the layers as well as between the image and sound signal.”
Spatial pattern / Carla CHAN 陳好彩 / 5m / 2010
Is it one space or many spaces? Are the four windows one space or four spaces? I have created a unified space with four windows to merge fragments into a world that you don’t see, but has emerged from a place I visited. Look for the secret rules that keep the fragments splitting and merging.
The artists adopt visual image sequences to form poetic scenarios, as is the case in Japanese Renku poetry, whereas visitors’ gentle finger work brings in mini human avatars scrolling through the virtual landscape.
Walking breaks up the illusion of a cohesive landscape – for this is a virtual walk through shared online multi-user worlds. [borders] documents such walks as they reveal hidden virtual property lines, invisible flaws of algorithmic landscape rendering and cut-off points, thus the constructed nature of the apparently seamless world.
A tribute to Wassily Kandinsky, the work Le Montage de l’émotion re-codes words into colors based on the coding system in Chinese telegraph, in order that interpretation gradually gives way to visual perceptual experiences.
This work is a recording machine of the mouse click activities of a computer, at a closer look, a sound installation that re-invents the clicks, alluding to the 2-word/sound utterances of ancient China poetry. Mouse-click notationtravels a long way, mapping the 2-word grievances of ancient Chinese laborers onto the contemporary digital time’s obsession with the binary.
記錄和再造使用電腦時的滑鼠按鍵聲，回響著遠古時把勞動聲音化成二言詩句的歷史。
IP Yuk-yiu 葉旭耀
Between the threshold of good and evil: film noir no.1 (Double Indemnity) [watch…]
A re-imagination of the film noir tale of crime and deception as a one-bit moral drama…
What’s in common between scribes copying manuscripts in the medieval age and female workers in garment factories in Hong Kong in the 1960s? Look for the scattered individual stations of their invisible assembly line. Intervene. Your casual input would endow upon an automated system new authorship and moments of play.
A digital video input is used for the score of a generative sound piece, revealing within a framed parcel the immense possibilities of the ocean. Sea of Mountains is an image-and-sound installation, a loop regarding infinity, or is it perhaps an attempt for a glimpse of natural structure?
Cinema is an art of gesture. 19th-century motion studies indicate that isolated gestures can be studied from any spatial temporal location to focus on their kinetic properties. This work invents secret connections between movie clips: the gestures of a person in one video bear the invisible motion trajectory of another invisible being elsewhere.
No dismay at fixing the expression of a face by a grab or a kick, a pull here and a thud there. Mediated Facial is an interactive sculpture made of wooden structures and elastic ropes, a metaphor of how electronic media pull the strings of our everyday communication.
Statements on life and death gathered real-time from Twitter are turned into images as a matrix bar code. Only visitors’ participation could activate the decoding of the encoded images to sort out the meanings.
As visitors lay a notepad on the desk, the artist’s memories would be dictated line by line on the blank pages, disclosing the secrets of his visual diaries. The Visual Diary Generator is an experimental installation transforming pixels extracted from video clips into words.
人工智能用它的記憶與邏輯理解我們的影像，把影片解讀成字句，為我們訴說每一段故事。
Justin WONG黃照達 City Forum《城市論壇》
City Forum evolves from the artist’s database-driven comic work Gei Gei Gaak Gaak (2007- ), by which repeated usage of image and graphic prototypes generates endless commentaries on social and political issues. With a rich library developed for 3 years, City Forum stretches the print work’s generative possibilities by creating a complex narrative via computational animation, thus loosening the boundary of comic writing.
SCREENING II / Jan 23, 2010 (Sunday) / 14:00-15:15 / Y-Studio
Moment from moments / WONG Chun-hoi王鎮海 / 5m / 2010
β / Kenji WONG 王偉健 / 15m / 2010
Map of Problematique / WONG Fuk-kuen黃福權 / 1m 45s / 2010
I narrate the O / Iriz YUEN袁雅詠/ 10m 15s / 2010
3 stories / KWOK Chui-han Bao 郭翠嫻 / 3m 18s / 2010
Fish 1/2 / KWOK Chui-han Bao 郭翠嫻 / 2m 42s / 2010
Wide Rothko / Vasco PAIVA / 10m / 2008
http://www.writingmachine-collective.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/banner_wmc4-screening.jpgLoss of footage: an invisible consciousness / Keith WONG黃柏麒 / 5m / 2010
Explosion / Alan KWAN關子維 / 6m 50s / 2010
Communication / Winnie CHUNG 仲浩甄 / 4m / 2010
Live show is(n’t) showing live / Jolene MOK 莫頌靈/ 5m 2s / 2010
22 Jan 10:00-12:00 / Y Studio / workshop for primary school students
29 Jan 10:00-12:00 / 2M/F / workshop for primary school students
Daniel Chong: ‘Chinese Ideogram & Animated Word-pictures’
Through playing creative games about Hieroglyphs, the course will let participants experience the relationship between pictures and texts and the transition from pictures to texts.
It will also introduce the last Hieroglyphs in the world: Dongba script (Naxi script)
莊德華: 意像圖與”字” “動”圖
透過創作和遊戲，讓孩子親身體會象形文字從圖畫轉化成文的過程。並介紹世界謹餘的最後象形文字—東巴文。
22 Jan 14:00 – 15:30 / Y-Studio
Dr. Hector Rodriguez: ‘Cinema, Gesture, Computation’ [Lecture]
The original vocation of early silent cinema was the purification, analysis, and exhibition of gesture. The subsequent rise of Hollywood narrative cinema, however, marginalized this gestural obsession. As character-driven story-telling came to dominate mainstream films, the purity of gesture was subordinated to narrative structure. This talk argues for a return to gesture as the fundamental aspiration of cinema.
Dr. Kenny Chow: ‘Cognition, Computation and Creativity’ [Lecture]
Humans create computers. Can computers think like a human? Can computers create artifacts like what humans do? When we make things with computers, where does creativity lie? In humans or computers? Have computers made us think like a computers? Is it a paradox?
Cutting and pasting have become familiar commands used on the computer in everyday life. This workshop will take the action of “cut and paste” back to its origin and explore how we can draw from a database of graphics to create new artworks. Using graphics from his comics, Justin Wong will lead workshops attendees in creating their own comics by following a simple direction that he，too，uses whilst creating: selection, cutting and pasting. This workshop aims at revealing the infinite possibilities of using database-driven creative methods.
Dr. Linda Lai: ‘Generative Thinking in Contemporary Art & Creative Writing’ [workshop]
‘Generative thinking’ has many names.
In biology, morphology, self-multiplication…
In mathematics, series formation…
In music, serialism…
In cybernetics, emergence, from single unit to complex structure…
In computing, algorithm
In art, rule-based creativity
This is a workshop in which participants apply ‘generative thinking’ to making individual and collective art pieces on the spot, experience computational thinking in a game. The activities will be accompanied by a short presentation of major art works in modern and contemporary art that manifest generative thinking.
Prof. Mary Flanagan: ‘Playworlds’ [Lecture/Workshop]
In her recent work, internationally recognized artist and cultural theorist Mary Flanagan discusses games and art. Games are systems and, like other forms of art such as theatre, set up an imaginary and magical space for things to happen. Games are spaces for encounter and surprise, and rarely are two games played alike. Different players, circumstances, chance operations (what we also call ‘luck’) — these all work together to create dynamic and incredible experiences.
In many of Flanagan’s game related artworks, she plays with game conventions and expectations, or uses such expectations for alternative purposes. For example. she will remove win states and read the game-as-system as one of duration and choice. She will often make conditions by which players see the culture around them, and the games they are playing, through a new lens.
In this talk Flanagan will discuss three works as they relate to the gaming phenomenon, [domestic] (2003), [perfect.city] (2009), and the [borders] series (2010-11).
The Writing Machine Collective 4th edition (Jan 14-30, 2011) promises to be a fresh and thrilling showcase of crème de la crème local media arts talents. 15 artists come together to offer us 12 unique works that explore how something so crucial to everyday life, the computer, can be an artistic medium. Utilizing no less than 100 pieces of electronic equipment (including huge LCD monitors, computers and projectors), and over 2 years of conceptualization and research, our exhibition aims at pinpointing the procedural operations as the computer’s basic, and rediscovering the generative and computational elements in existing art forms. Expect to see the awe-inspiring Scriptorium that mimics the production of books through a series of monitors; the eye-opening Gestus featuring an assemblage of 20 monitors; the hip jsut code that turns what you put on Twitter into an art work; the undeniably fun Mediated Facial, a 2-meter tall wooden sculpture where you are invited to tug and pull at to create your own masterpiece – just highlight a few. For a change, come, too, to view short videos showing ‘writing’ in the present continuous tense. And the best part is: there are loads more to see and learn at our exhibition. (Michelle Rocha)
