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ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS
AND MOVING FORWARD
Relevant artists and their practice
Michal Rovner
Rovner's works address tension and vulnerability through photography, film, installation, and video. She is known for blending digital technology to suit her own vision. I am particularly drawn to her series of video installation works projecting human's shadows on different objects. The figurines themselves give a sense of uncanniness, and it is their movements, from walking and hopping to chasing after each other, that serve as her narrative tool to tell stories of the mankind's unresolved and endless pursuits.
Michal Rovner's Waving (Maybe) (2018)
© 2019 Michal Rovner / Artists Rights Society, New York
Michal Rovner, Frequency exhibition at Ivorypress, Spain
Bruce Nauman
Nauman pioneers in making works that explore the complex relationship between live and recorded image. His works put audience in a realm between illusion and reality, prompting questions about the representation of time and space: Am I there or here? Is this me now or then? The pair of my video installation works also exploit the relationship between live and recorded image. Pedestrians captured on the Abbey Road Cam re-enact a distant walking action, mirroring the “there, then” to produce a new “here, now”. Viewers of my work look at walking postures performed in the past, but their own walking postures are also displayed in real time as spectacle.
Nauman also explores the performative quality of walking in Walk with Contrapposto. Being one of his first video works, he comically attempts to walk through a narrow corridor while maintaining the 'contrapposto' poses of figures in Classical and Renaissance sculpture. When he showed the work in the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1969 exhibition Anti-illusion, he screened it in a replica of the same corridor where he performed the posture for the camera, again blurring the distinction and making a mirroring between "there, then" and "here, now".
Research Festival
I continue my research on history of cinema and relationship between still and moving images. To showcase the outcome, I would make a flipbook machine that is inspired by early cinema techniques. The visual materials would be from my work @24framesoftruth, which features Instagram posts of individual frames from a film sequence. In the work I make use of Instagram's interface to animate still images which are digital copies of celluloid films. By making the flipbook machine, I transpose the digital content back to the physical space, restoring the scrolling action on the phone back to the rolling action of the hand crank. Viewers are invited to experience animation in its primitive form, going back and forth between early cinema and the digital age.
To further explore the viewer's fascination with motion and the moving image, I would present a video essay with live narration, tracing "non-narrative" movements in the history of cinema. I would engage the audience to find their own narratives from moving images around them.
Julian Opie
Being one of the key figures of the British New Sculpture Movement, Julian Opie is known for interpreting the aesthetics of everyday reality through a distinctive, minimal style, and conveying themes through the human body. He creates series of walking figures in different mediums, from paintings and sculptures to LED monoliths, turning common pedestrians to artistic protagonists. He once commented that the process of reading things as simulations but knowing at the same time that they are real is quite central to his work. I am struck by this notion. I sometimes imagine the repeated re-enactments at Abbey Road as simulations, but they are, indeed, real at the same time. The visual language Opie employs also challenges the audience attention, whether they should be looking at the outlines of the human figures, the bold colour choices, the characters' outfit, or the walking posture itself. By presenting the figures in both static and animated mediums, Opie also effectively deals with the complex relationship between the still and the moving. There are intriguing qualities in his static works depicting a frozen moment of the walking sequence, while his animated works, featuring an endless loop of people walking, evoke the viewer's fascination of the moving image. Situating at busy streets, the LED monoliths make a beautiful comparison of walking postures between that in the animation and those of the real pedestrians.
Julian Opie's Walking in New York (2020)
Julian Opie's Walking on O'Connell Street , Dublin (2008)
Bruce Nauman's Going around the corner piece (1970)
Further development of existing works
Abbey Road Movies
I continue to collect footage from the Abbey Road Cam daily and plan to do it until the end of this year. My new year's resolution would be to think about how to develop work from this year-long archive of footage. The current iteration of Abbey Road Movies involves stacking pedestrian figures from different days to create a collage of performances. After reflecting on it, I now believe that the work's focus should be on individual movements. I am considering creating a multi-channel video piece that highlights the unique movements of each pedestrian.
I am particularly intrigued by the “outtakes” — moments when pilgrims abruptly stop halfway upon spotting an approaching vehicle or when another pedestrian inadvertently interrupts their recording, forcing them to retreat. These "reflex actions", shaped by the changing circumstances at the scene, expose the performative nature of seemingly spontaneous human movements. I am keen to use these outtakes to explore what truly constitutes a performative routine.
Movie Triptych
I already completed three film sequences in my work @24framesoftruth, examining spectacle, time and the power of cuts in film. Moving forward, I aim to expand the project, utilising Instagrm's three-column interface to create a three-channel video installation. Film sequences would be made into each column to generate a dialogue about movements in different scenarios. In response to the fast-pacing internet culture, I plan to focus on the presentation of slow motion footage in this piece. I am impressed by Sheena Rogers' three-level framework for analysing possible psychological responses to slow motion imagery. This project will delve into the nuances of individual frames within these sequences, exploring how they resonate with viewers.
The installation piece would be scaled up, for it to present three separate columns of frames simultaneously. I tested some setups in the studio and would need further experiments and adjustments to ensure the equipment and arrangement work seamlessly.
Testing set-up of Movie Triptych
Bruce Nauman's Walk with Contrapposto (1968)