Urich Lau

1.1 The Artists’ Intent

Videology: a word made up to suggest “the study of how video or moving images are made and understood”.

It is a project that aims to challenge the working and research methods of five artists, all of whom take a process-based approach to artmaking. Claes Erik Eriksson, Julie Lee, Maxine Chionh, Patricia Ho and Veliana come from diverse artistic backgrounds: drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture. The exhibition thereof will show the artists’ intent to employ any form of the video medium in place of, or in conjunction with, their current methods and subject matters.

The project began when the five artists came together in an effort to expand their creative processes and explore alternative approaches in their art. They invited Urich Lau — a visual artist working with video — to be the curator who proposed the idea of the “transference of media” between static and motion, analogue and digital, still and moving images with the video medium and video making, also the transference from one working media and method to another. He became an appropriate mediator between the diverse media and materials used by the artists.

Videology will see the artists create works that shift the conditions in still and moving images, alter the audiences’ perceptions, and whimsical in willful contradictions with image making and installations. Works that emerge from the interplay of media and diverse materials, including some that are peculiar and others that are curious reproductions of memories.

1.2 The Curator’s Intervention

The artists and their working media and methods do not partake in video making. The curator sets a platform in their practices with the unfamiliar medium of video. A new outcome will be the result of such an intervention.

The curator is a practicing artist working with video, and looks into the methodology and interpretation of the medium. Now working with the five artists who work in different media and methods themselves, the curator pits a challenge to their practices with video making and sets to negotiate with the given gallery space as a containment and a setting for the video medium. What is the working and spatial relation with the video medium and the gallery? Is there consensus in the intermediate state or condition where the artists situate their new video works with the space and each other? How have the artists’ methods and subjects evolved? The outcomes will be resolved as the processes are revealed.

The project starts off with concerns from the artists about working methodologies and the processes in the manipulations and manifestations in their own works. And the only manifestation now comes from the accordance, or conflict, with the one imperative process in the study and making of videology.

videology-transparency.mp4

2.1 Artists’ Statements

2.1.1 Claes Erik Eriksson
A Virtual Walk
Interactive simulation on desktop computer with animated drawings
02:00 to 04:00 min

My work can be described as an interactive animation, indirectly interacting with the gallery space in virtual reality. Always had a great interest with video games and animation and this is my first try to actually directly combine them in a piece of work. I wished that I could make a similar experience method that you are exposed to when you play a game. Creating it using traditional animation, where everything is hand drawn, using the arrow keys on the keyboard you are able to walk around in this “game”. With this, you can explore the entire gallery space, from a place that takes the least physical place in the whole gallery.

2.1.2 Julie Lee
Start.Rewind.Pause.
Installation with 3 television sets
01:33 min

I see objects and actions as spaces and systems. Everything around us works in a formulation, whether it be intended or unintended.

The mechanical process of sewing on the bubble wrap takes on a formulation of a system that is not pre-empted. This leads to a fortuitous correspondence between the stitches and the bubble wrap.

Using video as part of/ in conjunction with, translates the process into an anomalous, systemic configuration, of logic and absurdity.

julie_lee.mp4

2.1.3 Maxine Chionh
Window View
[With editing by Willie Koh]
Video installation with window
02:00 min

I am fascinated with the window acting as an unwitting screen, naturally overlooking the road and corridor just outside the gallery; its shape is particularly reminiscent of a movie box with two black strips above and below the image. Reflecting on these characteristics for this show, I have decided to project my video on the window pane itself, creating an alternative viewpoint of the one outside. Instead of seeing people’s mid-sections, one would see passers-by’s foreheads and the crowns of their heads, making it seem as if either the gallery has been elevated, or the window has been relocated to a higher position - in correspondence with the original position the window had been in. Using the window pane as the screen also allows viewers outside the gallery to be able to see the projected video, and viewers on both sides can see each other’s shadows cast on the screen, thereby incorporating more life and interactivity in my work.

maxine-black_layer.mp4

2.1.4 Patricia Ho
[S] Physics
[With editing by Keith Desker]
Installation with 2 videos, television casings and found objects
00:20 min, dimension variable

Situation-al Physics is my developmental micro theme/theory within the context of “Videology” and its implicitly experimental dimensions.¹ This self-initiated pseudo-scientific category explicates my desire to aesthetically actualize John Dewey’s idea of the process-based [live] human being who labors not through [capitalistically-inclined] automated labour but comprehends ‘the doing’ as a transformative experience undergone in a/a series of situation/situations whilst imbuing a Hegelian heart-mind (of the instrumental and consummated) synthesis.

Hence my artwork exists and informs as an installation-cum-interactive entity [collective] with no categorical distinctions — each piece needing its situation-al neighbor to resonate clarity² — with the summative whole denying not its inherited environment [in this case, The Substation’s inherent institutionalized setting as a gallery] but felt intelligently circumventing spatial-temporal tensions; analogous to the Dewey-an advocacy of felt/aesthetic intellection in circumventing problematic situations to herald best possible outcomes [how Americana!].

With the imbuing of toilet aesthetics within an exhaustive media tapestry, I risk being subject to an accusation of triteness in material appropriation and re-appropriation [namely the ubiquitous-ness of toilets and the often-referenced Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal]. That accusation must be borne in the spirit of post-modern eclecticism and its penchant for self-mockery and double-entendre whereby the seeming mockery of institutionalized settings is achieved [ironically] not without the incorporation and corporation of the said institutions [by institutions here is really implied all the outward manifestations of neo-capitalism proper].

Scholastic rhetoric aside, it is my hope [if nothing else] that the juxtaposition of toilet aesthetics with a latent media tapestry introduces an element of humor that triggers consideration for what are basically extraneousness consumables to human sustenance — consideration at their increasingly irascible permanence in the name of human progress is a cause indeed for individual and social concern whereby humor (via au de toilette) is mere accompaniment cushioning an inconvenient truth.

Enjoy your live experience dear reader as I give you Situation-al Physics.

[Remember] * [Search for remote within Situation-al Physics’ space] * [Press ENTER] * [Enjoy]

patricia_ho.mp4

2.1.5 Veliana
Taped
Installation with video magnetic tapes
8.3 m x 3.9 m

Through my work Taped, I seek to offer a possibility of interpreting ‘video’ as material object, where — through the means and essence of the medium itself — the processes of recording and broadcasting become tangible, present-moment phenomena.

1. Refer to Jeremy Sharma’s and Toh Hun Ping’s Athlete for a succinct exemplification of experimental video art. [↩]
2. Refer to Shubigi Rao whereby she intimates that resonance is a mind-body dwelling state before the Barthesian “punctum”. [↩]