Author: Jiacheng Xia

The thing that I found the most resonating is that don’t do anything that you don’t like but will “Look good on your CV.” I had the exact same experience when I was in high school. My mother wanted me to get into good universities, and she thought that computer science combined with economics suits me as a direction to apply. To make my experiences look better, she got me into an internship (more like a training program) in that direction, and every hour of it was torture to me. It was after that I promised myself that I would never do something I don’t like just to make my resume look better.

There was an interactive website that I had a deep impression of, and I am very sure it exists, as I have the memory of using it for a course response. However, as sad as it is, I failed to find it again.

It is a simple website, which tells a story of something that happened in a wooden hut near the lake(not the horror game series of course). Upon entry, there is a prompt that the user can press space at any time of the video. The story I don’t clearly remember, but it was the way it displayed the story that moved me. If you don’t press space at all, the video will only be about some man going into the hut, touching things here and there, and wandering about the hut. However, the scene will change if you press space at any time. The camera is still at the same position pointing at the same angles, but it shows the story that happened years ago. The guy visiting the hut was part of the event that got the hut abandoned, and his walking through the scenes, touching things here and there, perfectly guides the camera so that the story that happened before is recorded.

This narrative technique, where past and present intertwine, profoundly moved me and made me reflect on the nature of time and memory. I was interested in the concept of time since I was very young. Time, what a fascinating thing that goes on and on and moves only forward. It slows for no one, waits for no one, and keeps moving forward as if it doesn’t care about anything or anyone. It washes away traces of what happened and blurs the memories. And there it is, memory, a word only meaningful with time but also killed by it. The storytelling of the website shows these concepts unintentionally, but it touched me so much that I remember it to this day. The man was revisiting the hut as if revisiting the already blurry memory of the history that occurred, while the observer(or the user of the website) sees the history in action, and tries to picture what the man is going through. It could never be the same, as the man revisits the place to refresh the already blurry memories, but the viewers are just watching a recorded tape. It is only after time when the memories of watching the video fade and we go back to looking at the hut replaying what happened in our heads, that we viewers can actually feel the man.

As I was writing this line, I began to feel not sad about losing the website, but relief. Remembering what was, and revisiting it are completely different experiences. For the man in the video, the thing that happened meant a lot to him, so when the memories blur, he decided to revisit the place, to reclaim his hut and his memories of it. But is it the same thing for me? Did I lose what was meaningful to me? No, I did not. I did not care the slightest about what happened in the hut. What I cared about was the feeling it gave me and the thoughts it provoked. Since these are the things I care about, am I not revisiting my hut right now when I am writing these words? Am I not refreshing the memories that actually meant something to me on the website that I have lost? Time is merciless, as it washes away both the important and the unimportant, but in another way, it is merciful, as it will leave enough information for you to replay what matters, and empties the unimportant so there is space for more.

So, back to the beginning. There was an interactive website that I had a deep impression of, and I am very sure it exists, as I have the memory of using it for a course response. However, as fortunate as it is, I failed to find it again, and it opened up a brand new world in front of me, and I got more than I could ever have if I were to review the website once more.

What I have the deepest impression about his works is how he makes the audience part of the performance. It breaks the fourth wall completely and the performers not only know about the existence of the audience but made it such a way that the audience are performers as well. I find this method very innovative and interesting. I am a bit sad I didn’t ask for some specifics about how he guides the audience to participate.

Topic: electric fan blowing wind

Analogy:

1. The fan spins quickly
2. The wind is sucked in from the back of the fan
3. The wind is blown out from the front of the fan
4. You can barely feel the wind in the back of the fan, but the wind blowing out of the fan is strong and cool
5. The fan has many blades
6. The wind being sucked in from the back comes from a wide angle, but the wind blown out is concentrated

This is like creative teamwork. All members in the group think of ideas from many different perspectives that may sound like nothing in the beginning, process them in a group, and produce a result that is really something.

Differences from the original topic:

1. Wind/air is unlimited, but ideas exhaust.
2. Ideas can still be generated with only one or two members, but a fan with only one or two blades doesn’t work well.

Making: A setup that consists of an electric fan within a tube, there are two smaller tubes for applying air with different colored dust. The fan spins and the dust is blown from the right to the left. The color of the dust changes over time, and the fans when spun show three images: people discussing, people getting inspiration, and people showing ideas to another one. The following is an indication of how the setup will look like.

One of these assumptions moved me a lot, as I have experienced such things recently. I felt so resonated when I saw the sentence “Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do and what you did.” I am working on an indie game project, and I have a sort of ambitious vision that I want to realize in a few years. However, I have been working on the basic structure and architecture for a whole semester now and I am still stuck on some of the most basic things, and what I have right now looks nothing like what I have envisioned. It frustrated me for a long while but now I am embracing it. It does not matter whether this result would perfectly be what I envisioned. It only matters that I have gained valuable experience making this project and I can look back an be proud of what I have achieved.

All my life (until recently) I have been dealing with STEM topics. In my experience doing these problems, you have to be correct at every step. It was also in our education that every step must be present and correct to get full marks. Sometimes even when there is a different and correct way to do a problem, we are asked to use the method that is most likely to be the standard one, because it will be easier for the teachers to grade and have the least risk of being deducted marks. Personally, My thoughts move rather rapidly, and I could be reminded of stuff that sounds totally unrelated but just has a small link in it, and even that link might be only present because of my personal experiences. Therefore I struggled a lot in the education system I grew up in. So I really like the idea that sometimes a wrong move or a seemingly irrelevant step might be the key to the answer.

I liked her idea of adding ideas that don’t fit together to create something new, that is her idea of adding water to her electronic instrument. Her idea of using vibrations and processing them with digital means is very interesting to me because the sound is caused by vibrations, altering vibrations with certain patterns makes it still the same sound pattern but with different tones or timbre.

Our WHY questions:

Why do we need to dig a tunnel
Because I want to
Why do you want to dig a tunnel
Because I’m bored
Why are you bored
Because I’ve got nothing to do
Why do you have nothing to do
Because I have no friends
Why do you have no friends
Because I spent all of my time building this machine
Why do you build this machine
Because I want to dig a tunnel
Why do you want to dig a tunnel
Because I’m bored
Loop

From this set of Why questions, I immediately thought of a Chinese science fiction novel called Three Body. In the series, there were quotes such as “If I destroy you, what business is that of yours?” “For a civilization in the universe, it does not and cannot have any friends.” These why questions reminded me of these quotes. For a higher civilization, destroying a lower civilization is as easy as a flick of its hand. Then I related to the destroyed lower civilization through their struggles and came up with the idea of drawing paintings of the same scenario but only from opposite perspectives. One is on the higher level of civilization, where destroying other civilizations is simple and celebrated; the other is on the destroyed civilization, where they fought for freedom and salvation but still failed.

“I am hungry.”

“Why are you hungry?”

“I didn’t have lunch.”

“Why didn’t you have lunch?”

“I wasn’t hungry then.”

“Why wasn’t you hungry?”

“Why so many whys?”

“Because there is always a cause and effect.”

“Why is there always a cause and effect?”

“Because the world’s logical.”

“Why is the world logical?”

“Imagine if it’s not.”

Making Idea:

Imagine if the world is not logical. Cause and effect all messed up. Events are not caused by what comes before, but are instead caused by what comes after, have no cause at all, or are caused by conceptual rules. For example, rain, if caused by something in the future, could be because the ground will be wet, so the rain must come down now. If caused by nothing at all, then looking up might be a sunny and clear sky. If caused by conceptual rules, the rain may be caused by the weather forecast saying there will be rain.

Making: https://youtube.com/shorts/smidfc7Po0A

The video was a bit flawed. I remember I did record the wet window of the taxi to indicate there was rain but when I went back to see the clip it was not there. The clip was to express that what if the world is not logical? what if rain is not caused by clouds and humidity and such but caused by what happened after, or caused by something merely describing it, or caused by nothing at all?

I like this artist a lot, because when I was young I also liked thinking about random things. I have also thought about how other people hear my voice, because when I hear myself I am listening through my bones and flesh but when other people hear me they are listening through air. Opposingly, I wonder if anyone else wondered how I sound to myself. That is what she was doing, although I don’t think it was because of the same reasons, but I really liked her experimental idea.