The Chaos and Memories exhibition, which the Phi Center is offering until June 11, is made up of FRAMERATE, a British immersive installation on the tense relationship between the human species and the Earth, as well as four Taiwanese virtual reality works. A full-bodied program and as challenging as international news!
FRAMERATE: Pulse of the Earth is a creation of British studio ScanLAB Projects, which specializes in 3D scanning the reality of the world to project us into the future. Suffice to say that the changing landscapes, which this installation diffuses in accelerated, are not really images that we analyze with joy of heart.
The work reviews some human activities that contribute to killing, eradicating, inhabiting, exploiting or redesigning spaces on the planet. But it also addresses the growth of plants which is a real balm, even if it is temporary during the experience of about 25 minutes.
The viewing of the film is done in a dark room, seated or standing, which helps to immerse us completely in the subject. A feeling of embarrassment invades us when we see all these cattle glued against each other on a cattle farm, the speed of the film giving the impression that the animals have no heads but only bodies. The accelerated images in a London intersection refer us to a human condition assimilating to the fate of ants. And those taken in a quarry make the machinery mistaken for cave worms…
Both the film and the installation are aesthetically surprising. The projection screens, located on the walls, on the ceiling and on the floor, make you dizzy if you don’t want to miss anything, increasing this feeling of unease that an analysis of the subjects covered helps to provoke. These images recorded continuously for very long periods of time and then accelerated at breakneck speed confront us with our destiny and our responsibilities. It’s hard not to come out a little smeared… from this other criticism of our suicidal species.
Here is a theatrical closed-door narration filmed in virtual reality by Craig Quintero with a poetic approach and a very beautiful and sensitive acting by actress Yu-Hsin Yu and her partner Ollie Huang. A film about encounter, intimacy, our fears, our needs, our dreams, our loneliness and our communions. The film was screened last year at the Venice Biennale.
Fantastic 3D animated film about a little boy who escapes during a nap started on the bench of a wonderful train station suspended in the sky! He begins to follow the red tail of a fish, finds himself in a cable car car full of strange creatures. Man seems to be no more than a species like any other, on an Earth that has become desert and ugly. The sequel is magical, the drawing is attractive and the subject, an invitation to learn from our mistakes, to bear our little tragedies and to keep our spirits up!
Certainly the most striking film of the four. A dark page in the history of Taiwan that the “White Terror”, this period of 38 years (between 1949 and 1987) during which thousands of Taiwanese intellectuals suspected of sympathy with the Chinese Communist Party were imprisoned, even executed. Chen Singing’s film tells the story of some of them. Very well done and rather creepy.
A word of advice, end your visit with Missing Pictures! Clément Deneux’s film about Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang keeps you in a good mood! The images of this little boy (him!) fascinated by his grandfather are touching. Their intimate relationship will shape the destiny of the future director born in Malaysia and whose film Stray Dogs won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2013.
