<Tentacular Thinking> 多觸思考
Juror’s SPECIAL MENTION 評審特别表揚
- Algae, Mask
Jurors’ note
Queenie Li’s Algae Dream stands out on my “must include” list. As a video essay, it is deploying varied rhetorical strategies with versatility, building a strong audio-visual architecture to substantiate the subject matters of the author’s concern.
The 10-minute work is a much needed effort to challenge disciplinary boundaries and what amounts to a timely video essay. Much needed: there is a lot of room between personal confession and scientific instruction that could be playfully experimented in the domain of a video essay. Timely: there is the urgency to make sense of our fast deteriorating human conditions. Algae Dream is a fine supplement to the rather impoverished and biased discussion of the pandemic, and it proves artistic methods could be relevant.
Using the first person “I,” Li achieved an artistic documentary that is at once personal and curious of scientific realities. These days, our routine media platforms are jammed with scientific images such as those of COVID-19, which weigh on us with an authority we have no way to reject. Yet perhaps they are simply pseudo-scientific, or pure visual strategies – how do we know, and what do we really understand from them? What I like about this work is that images do not push for objective accuracy: somewhere between concrete forms and poetry, they impress on us the power of imageries, a kind of perceptual apprehension requiring inquisitiveness over analysis, whereas the voice-over affirms the place for doubt and enquiry without losing the magic of curiosity. Neither the “I” nor the work pretends to be authoritative. At points, it is a reading report, a confession of doubt and helplessness, commanding critique, and other points it simply forces us to see imaginatively what is supposed to be invisible.
Though sticking to a scientific discourse of health and disease, the work is strongly affinitive with critical theory issues, in exposing the “class” base of progressive values such as green life, sustainability, organic life-style and so on. Though overall inspirational, the tentacular thinking employed cleverly links the algae to the mask, from the originary of life forms to contemporary symptoms of the Anthropocene, thus imploring renewed eco-consciousness from its readers. As well, Algae Dream cleverly imbues queer thinking into a refreshed understanding or our relation to other species.
A rich conceptual map that persuades with poetry and artistic overtones. Following her unique documentary impulse, Li aptly finds the aesthetic and poetic to discuss science without being dogmatic… and allows science to be contemplated poetically without the burden of objective absoluteness. (Linda C.H. Lai)
- cluster, sorites paradox, life transforming, environmental
- video essay, travel, cave theory, socializing, crater
通過取香雞的景器展示畫廊社交場景的視頻，指出與觀眾相關聯的第一人稱視角。然後，故事變成了發現第一個舉行社交活動的人類住所的歷史（山洞）。通過改變我們看藝術的方式，敘述者將我們帶到畫廊和我們都面臨的迴圈。為了逃脫，時間凍結，藝術家深入研究了維蘇威火山的故事，並從歷史和神話角度看隕石坑的形成方式。藝術家的相機成為穿越時空的觀賞者的交通工具。旁白以帶有情緒的口吻引導觀眾，而路線則是通過引領和繞道將每個不同的場景連接起來。
Producer: Amanda Nedham, Shirley Wu
Assistant Director: Jessie Chang
Director of Photography: Shao Wen Liang
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