Prolonged and internalized trauma yields internal power, not so much hidden as unnameable emotions, but exteriorized as solidarity, against evacuation in the name of progress, and transcending national boundaries… Hong Kong, France. Wang Chau, Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
The pictogram method was applied to the reading and reconstructing of various commercial heats, including the pre-Disney 1933 animation classic on Snow White and Pandora’s Box featuring Stephen Chow, resulting in various works, three of them shown at the exhibition The Ventriloquists…Thinking Narratively (4-19 July 2020) at Floating Projects. 《腹語系:微敘思考》展場中,有三個圖形轉化的作品,選擇了兩個商業收益叫好的作品 — 迪士尼《白雪公主》面世前,費里沙創作的黑白動畫,還有周星馳的《西遊記之月光寶盒》。
More pictograms representing two experimental films by Zbigniew Rybczynski, New Book (1975) and Tango (1981), by 3 artists at the show Ventriloquists…Thinking Narratively (4-19 July 2020). A stretched vocabulary of narrativity. Multi-linearity, simultaneity, superimposition, convergence of trajectories, generative loops. 更多的圖形敘事解構,伸展了的敘事語彙。多向多線發展。共時性。重疊。弧度的結點、匯合。衍生式的循環。張開現實的奧秘。
Like Calvino’s The Invisible Cities, Oulipo founder Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (Exercises in Style) is another example of generative literature transmediated as pictograms. Artist Madeleine Chan takes up 5 episodes of the work. After a generative principle, she produces 5 iterative views of the same event as pictograms, stretching Queneau’s textual play in written words.
A pictogram is a form of knowledge; a pictogram that reconstructs another existing work is the stretching of the epistemological potential of a work. In the pictogram exercises presented at “The Ventriloquists … Thinking Narratively,” the reading and re-reading of Calvino’s The Invisible Cities combines the methods of music scoring, cartography, story-boarding and chronology-making, each with its own conceptual emphasis in presenting pictures of realities. Here, one pictogram offers glimpse of these concepts. 解構式的圖形是知識的具體表現;重塑已存在的作品的圖形是對現有作品的知識能量的擴展,同時也是對班雅明的「作者作為生產者」的想法的一種回應,關注個別的作如何站立於一個時代的技術生產當中。這裡以一個創作為例。
Two artists read YU Hua’s novella World List Mists (1988) and translate it analytically and structurally into a pictogram form to augment textures of sentiments and narrative integrity, maximizing a fatal body of cybernetics through methods of scoring, cartography, chronology and storyboarding. 兩個圖像作品,兩個創作者對余華的《世事如煙》的轉化閱讀,呈現敘事性如何把哀愁、絕望化為結構,點對點的連線,網絡的展現,把個人的「命運」背後的人為操控層層展露。
Three works interpret American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, each visualizing a unique aspect of the film. 三個圖像,結構細節形骸有別,都是對準美國前衛名作《午間的網陣》,剖開不同層面的內部物質真相。
Agriculture and pandemics: from indeterminacy to solidarity — Would this summer be a ripe time to implement a dual power strategy? 農耕與大流行。這個暑假會是實踐雙重權力戰略的良機?
Connecting childhood: yours, mine and theirs. Fishing with Popo (2011) by Lilian Fu is among the artist-animator’s first experiments with documentary animation. Several young artists have responded… Two pictograms on this work, by William Phuong and Louise Chan, exhibited at The Ventriloquists…Thinking Narratively, 4-17 July 2020, are transmedia extension of Fu’s animated memories of her grandma.
夢。林建才手繪。英倫小城遙祭香港。2019年10月。劉清華組合選輯。”Dreaming,” Kin-choi Lam’s solemn thoughts on Hong Kong from Cambridge, UK. October 2019. Jess Lau selection.