2 Lectures
14:00-16:00 / Y-Studio
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.
Decontextualization / Kenny WONG黃智銓 / 4m 15s / 2009
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.