Can You Hear Me?
2016 3-Channel Video Installation
Duration: Looped Videos
Materials: Digital Projectors & 16mm Film Projector
Collaboration with Ten Ten Yitian Yan & Jing Yu
This project is a collaboration between myself and Feedchicken Collective, an experimental music group of TenTen Yitian Yan and Jing Yu. At the time of this project, I was interested in self-reflection, auto awareness, and non-linguistic communications. The center video presents Tenten listening to an audio recording of her heartbeat. Sounds of her heartbeat reverberated through space and set the tempo of the video installation experience. The videos to the left and right show documentation of performative research that we carried out at a live poultry shop in Brooklyn, NY. We used colored lights and audio samples in an attempt to communicate with the chicken. They document our genuine interest and curiosity in communicating while also showing our unorthodox methods’ difficulty and uncertainty, for we do not know what the chicken had to say.
The video installation contemplates our relationship to self and others, especially other species who do not speak our language or follow our communication mode. It was presented in a panoramic view using two digital projectors and a 35mm film projector. The viewer needed to shift their heads left and right in an attempt to see the videos. The inability to see everything at once and needing to shift around to view a video was interesting in communicating a sense of chicken identity.