Artist: Laiwan Year: 1998 Duration: 15:00 Country: Canada Starting with a re-investigation of the five elements: earth, fire, water, air and love, REMOTELY IN TOUCH explores how digital, visual and informational processes alter the way we perceive the world, ourselves and the act of perception in general. Images created by remote digital signals sent via satellite or robotic camera from the Internet etc. are used to poetic and surreal effect. The digital are jammed between analog images of a visceral moment or an embodied movement to raise questions: what is real? what is body? how is representation inadequate? how does technology predetermine what and how we see? how are images construction or a fiction fo science? Approached with a philosophical yet humorous sense of metaphor and meaning, REMOTELY IN TOUCH plays with what we know as an image. The artist's blood cells, NASA's mission to mars, ultrasound imaging, an underwater volcano, exploratory surgery by robotic camera, Wing Chun martial arts, and other found images are lyrically woven together with text and audio. Continuing in a playful spirit, the music is designed from the first 24 notes of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Digitally altered, Bach is transformed into a new composition no longer recognizable as Bach. DISTRIBUTED BY Video Out: http://www.videoout.ca/catalog/remotely-touch%0B

REMOTELY IN TOUCH

A two-minute trailer for my first video work exploring how digital media and its possible 'immateriality' alters the way we move and perceive in the world and in relation to analogue materiality and phenomena. The ability to experience extreme macro views and internal micro views brings to light somatic questions of affect and subjectivity and in the context of epistemology and ontology.

This work signals the beginning of my examining the question where did colonialism go? in relation to the insistent propagation of information culture in the west.

The music soundtrack is constructed from digital sampling evolving from the first opening notes from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier: Prelude in C Major.

 

Year: 1998
Duration: 15:00
Country: Canada

Poetic and surreal, Remotely In Touch explores what we perceive as an image; what is 'real'; what is constructed or science fiction; and what are our new codes of signification created by systems of information. Remotely in Touch uses images created by remote digital signals — sent via satellite or robotic camera — and juxtaposes these with analog video images encapsulating a 'visceral moment' or an 'embodied movement'.

Imagery include: blood cells from the artist captured through an electronic microscope; the Pathfinder mission to Mars; ultrasound imaging; an underwater volcano; exploratory surgery using a robotic camera; Wing Chun martial arts; images from the Human Genome Project; satellite imagery of the earth's surface... all lyrically woven together with text and audio, utilizing a philosophical yet humorous sense of metaphor and meaning.

Conceived, written and edited by Laiwan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DISTRIBUTORS
The full length video work can be found here:

Video Out, Vancouver

VTape, Toronto

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to Chris Welsby for graduate studies supervision of this project in 1998 at the School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, and Video In Studios for technical and editing access.

Additional thanks to Michelle Frey, steve chow, Centime Zeleke, and John Fukushima for assistance in making the work.