Lane Shi | Otay:onii
Troubadour / Sound
Installation Performer

• Concept

This is a Ping-Pong table installation that invites people to play. On the table surface, there are pieces of information gathered as a string of thoughts, divided by xy -axis coordination: west and east by left and right on the x-axis, past and future from bottom to top on the y axis. My thought in 2020 will be an example of a human’s doubt towards those fragmented yet authorized information. The pingpong bats are mirrors, playing on the left side of the table triggers the right part of the broken glass light  hanging on the top of it(and vice versa). It intends to deliver an observation: whenever we interact with the world, it offers us an introspection in an opposite standpoint and the act of choosing to believe in the news weights more than the news itself. It is fragmented reality we live in, and we all chase light within.

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• Process

{ What's Not Broken? } was presented in shanghai during studio gallery artist residency in late 2020, along with another interactive installation 

{ Who's Not Broken? Shanghai } and an installation performance which I intended to create a conversation with these 2 pieces under the instrumentation of sound and dance.

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• Within the piece

Human beings’ average expectancy is 78.93 years in the modern era and history consists of the recorded fragments of the conjectures from generation to generation, the history never appears in its complete form. For example, the reason for the dinosaurs’ distinction remains in discussions in the scientific world. The origin of the human species can be traced backward via scientific methods as big as the Theory of Evolution, as small as viviparity; or theological angles like Noah’s Ark and Jesus Christ. Has the Theory of Evolution, apart from its wide use and praise of Darwin, been investigated and verified? And who gets to supervise this investigation and verification? Was the flood before Noah's Ark truly a natural disaster? Whose body did it submerge? Who gets to hold the authority of explaining the history in the future?

 

Thus, history seems to stay insoluble. Is it Nihilism that’s the next to sneak in? Perhaps, perhaps that sentiment deserves to be deciphered from quite an opposite stance. The substance of void is the most reliable premise. In this sentence, “void” is not a sacred belief, but a helpless reality. The authenticity of history probably appears to rather reflect the wisdom for those who goes back to it. It is not difficult to imagine such picture of us carrying a loaded biandan (shoulder pole): on one side we as a whole human species identity fail to reflect and avoid the repetitive mistakes in history, on the other side is the attempt from the elitists as a collective or individuals to utilize and assimilate the "otherlings". Both are irreversible. The scene is similar to a computer screen that is stuck on a frame, on which the glitch of the past takes place simultaneously with the re-rendering of the future, intertwined and entangled. The history uses the concept of time to connect and yet a vessel to disconnect, and the vessel’s precipitation and accumulation resemble an Ouroboros, ending while starting. We are the excrement of the worms living inside a vertebrate of its vertebral column; we want to analyze the marrow, but in our excrement physical reality, we have not yet gotten hold of the knowledge that molecules forms into the marrow. Then when we look at the word "history" again, what we are facing here is not the history itself, but only a mirror with ourselves in it.

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People had been walking through human history for long, every interaction with the outside worlds forms a mirror of us and for ourselves. In those formations and reflections, who dares to say that we haven’t tried to catch the phantoms from the body of the void? attempting to create means to life and accomplish something rather than contributing to the big emptiness?The phantoms are the worlds in those fragmented sheds. Maybe logic and reasons can join the ball this time: it has reached the other shore, nights exchanged with the fanatics and disco is on at this peak of the morning.