2020 Fall, Threat

Program Notes

Threat, hostility, accusations... The world in 2020 separates and struggles in the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic. Setbacks to globalization, the intensification of China-US relations, and the gradual tightening of travel bans have made many Chinese in the United States feel uneasy and hesitant. We are currently witnessing the fragile side of this relatively friendly world order.

This unprecedented social isolation has pushed our discussions on the Internet and social networks into the spotlight. With big data and artificial intelligence funneling information with algorithms designed to satisfy us constantly, we become trapped in a single stream of information. This deep penetration of images through the Internet has shaped our understanding of the world and has also opened up a new plane of battlefields. The active and passive entangling of the providing, searching, and delivering of images is becoming more and more obvious with the popularity of social networks. This process of providing images has both shaped society and accelerated social divisions, leading us to information warfare. Different powers and organizations actively intervene in the editing and delivery of images in order to transmit their ideologies and cull their herd.

2020 Fall, Threat is a video artwork of a chase scene pieced together by war footage and musical artifacts. Both the images and the music are assembled by similar processes of collage, severing these elements from their initial context and defamiliarizing them through processing in order to create an audio-visual tapestry of mismatched fragments and artifacts. In the end we were driven by the following questions: Who is directing these images? Why are we going to review these images? Where does our editing take the viewer?