The Swimmer I

Single-channel video
2017

In the sunny day, the camera lens is shooting the sea surface, a swimmer is swimming slowly on the sea. The swimmer seems to keep swimming or may be something will happen. If audience looks carefully, they will find that the swimmer has not been swimming all the way since the camera shutter was pressed, but the same swimming loop is repeating on the screen constantly. In other words, the swimmer is trapped in the border of digital lens, there is no entrance and exit.

In the artwork, the lens sets up a boundary that does not exist on the scene, it makes the “camera lens -> swimmer -> sea” and “sea -> swimmer -> camera lens” two axes coexist and parallel staggered. Is it rectangular small pool, or swimming in the vast sea?

On the other hand, “The swimmer I” reveals the question of video’s temporality. The swimming loop indicates that there is a strange time point in the video. It can be any moment in the video, but it also not equal to any moment. It becomes a strange point that disintegrates and constructs a particular temporality of image content. As Gilles Deleuze said the crystals of time:

Time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same time, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past. Time has to split at the same time as it sets itself out or unrolls itself: it splits in two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past. Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal. (CINEMA II: The Time-image 81)

When the diachronic and linear image time is released, the image content is peeled off from the time base that the image relies. It takes root into the sea, and it self-satisfies and condenses to form its time system. This crystal of time is distributed average on the swimmer’s loop. When the audience joins into the system, there will be a moment, their senses feel stagnant, almost vacuum.

The Swimmer II

Two-channels video
2017

When the film is sliced.

This is an incident, that is, the scare occurs after the event. Speed ahead of consciousness, so that the density of the original film gathers at the moment of the collision, that is Paul Virilio said the moment of picnolepsie, the presence of absence.

With the irregularity of the epileptic space, defined by surprise and an unpredictable variation of frequencies, it’s no longer a matter of tension or attention, but of suspension pure and simple (by acceleration), disappearance and effective reappearance of the real, departure from duration. (The Aesthetics of Disappearance 22)

Audience sat in front of the video for a long while and tried to find some clues among the slight changes. Compared to Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho” (1993), by the time editing technology of film, the 32 seconds of the original film is played by frame to 2 hours, it is slow enough to cut off the continuity of the film and then becomes each separate slide. The speed of collapse, the moment of picnolepsie is unfolded (it is a gap in continuity), there is only relevance of the content between the film and the event. The tension of the event totally disappears, so that it makes the film detach from original event and exist individually. In addition, at the other end of the exhibition, the original event is reproduced on the screen at the original speed, and therefore the conflict that is caused by the speed occurs. On the one hand, the work reproduces the event, on the other hand it deconstructs and reconstructs a non-narrative vacuum video. The tension of the work also occurs in the collapse of the tension.