CAC×798CUBE ForumGreen and White Narrations: The Passage Between Digital Images and Material World
Date:
2024.7.27 (Saturday)
Time:
15:00 – 17:00
Guests:
collectif_fact，Phoebe-Lin Elnan, CHEN Min
Language:
English, Mandarin
Venue:
The lecture room at 798CUBE
2 Jiuxianqiao Rd, Chaoyang, Beijing
Co-hosts:
Chronus Art Center, 798CUBE
Supported by:
Pro Helvetia Shanghai, the Swiss Arts Council
Screens are the projection of human imagination and desire, dreams and memories, Digital media accelerates the deluge of narratives. Visual and acoustic symbols contorted in digital consumerism are always drifting away from its meaning and becoming to be vacuum buzzwords or a bundle of endless digital materials.
With a critical examination of the pixelized symbols and representations, artists Phoebe-Lin Elnan in her film Breaking News revealed the relations of the world behind the figure green, a color that is read as void by image processing algorithms; while the White Shadow by collectif_fact transforms flat images on the screens into vertiginous 3D objects that dominates the reality in a speculative future.
On July 27, Elnan and collectif_fact will bring audiences to delve into their films, and have a conversation with guest speaker CHEN Min based on how their artistic practices re-enact suffusing digital images or objects outside of techno-logos and revealed their materiality inherent in contemporary social and ecological imaginary.
< About the Works >
Breaking News
Phoebe-Lin Elnan
2022
The video is a huit-clos featuring the same actors playing a range of characters on the different programs of the Better News Channel. As the situation in the television studio devolves, the artifice of ‘green’ is revealed through strategic fourth wall breaks. Drawing upon specific cases of contemporary sugarcane production and the land grabbing and greenwashing it engenders, the video exposes parts of the reality that is capitalist commodification and financialisation of food and land. Using choppy montage that parodies neoliberal media products to stage direct quotes from advertisements and commentators, the video renders the absurdly quotidian (non-)representation of systemic injustice visible through humour and satire.
White Shadow
2021
collectif_fact
The film was made using found 3D scans and sounds all downloaded from Internet libraries. Portraits, food, cars, and all sorts of junk, that fill servers here depict a vertiginous architecture. An accumulation, now so devastating, that it creates new uncontrollable borders and isolated people. The film is a speculative fiction that attends to visualises endless digital production and makes it almost tangible. Along with the images, text messages evoke a new society living with limitations and suffering from media saturation, sensory overload, and crushing ecological impact. A world where images have taken over, invading, and transforming space. They become the only reality that is still visible, as the whole world is turning inwards.
<Co-hosts>
collectif_fact
The collectif_fact comprised Annelore Schneider and Claude Piguet. They live and work between London and Geneva and teach respectively at Goldsmiths MA Design and HEAD Geneva, Image-Sound Pool. Their projects, primarily videos, explore the massive production of images and digital content, as well as their pervasive, alienating, and ecological impacts on our contemporary lives. Their research investigates the role and use of digital tools in the creation of speculative worlds and fiction production.
collectif_fact uses narration, cinematographic codes, and editing to speculate and investigate how narratives can be appropriated, disrupted and re-edited. Their videos mix a complex set of references from 3D scans, snippets of film dialogues, and archival images to sound extracts. A collage of familiar and recognizable images emerges, with a multitude of allusions to our visual culture. collectif_fact plays with our desire to be drawn in and deceived by these images, encouraging the viewer to critically reflect on the habits that condition our perceptions of reality.
Phoebe-Lin Elnan
Phoebe-Lin Elnan (1993) is a Norwegian-Singaporean artist and curator based in Geneva, Switzerland. She writes and performs often with and/or about food, using absurd humour and parody. Having worked within the intersection of art and ecology since 2018, she approaches both food and environment with a decolonial and anticapitalist lens. Phoebe is co-coordinator of Ways of Repair : Loss & Damage, an artistic research residency and trans-disciplinary program on the topic of climate change-induced loss and damage. She is also part of the collective “as slow as possible” that is on curatorial residency at Espace 3353 in Geneva from 2023 – 2025.
CHEN Min
CHEN Min is a curator and researcher. Her research directions come from the intersection of Art & Tech, Surrealism & European Avant-Garde Movements. In recent years she curated exhibitions for Jimei X Arles International Photo Festival, Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture Shenzhen, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, etc. She is currently working on cross-cultural projects with European art institutions. She was awarded the Hyundai Blue Prize 2019, published in “New Arts”, “LEAP”, “The Thinker”, “Art China”, and “Pengpai”, among others several translations of art theory books have been brought to publication.