Autocorrects

2023, 03:03, three-channel video installation

16mm film transferred to HD

A voice narrates in reminiscence of downtempo beat music in the Chinese speaking music industry from the early 90s; a genre heavily influenced by earlier movements from the US and Europe. Charged with feelings, and amplified by rhythmic narration, this locally adapted genre often uses specific synths and instruments to construct a certain sense of urban sentiment, a reflection of the booming of urban development and its atmosphere at that time.

Working with the genre’s tropes, the song starts with a thunderstorm and a telephone ring, and directly cuts to another sample: a found interview with a Western music producer writing for the Korean pop music industry casually comments on the different relations to feeling in music production between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Who writes from feeling, and who’s more structured? 

As the monologue slips in between memories, app chats, descriptions of violent tools and protest slogans, the I and U are never fixed, as they traverse through offenses, sensations, and scenes of capture and injury. What does one lose when one sends a palm pic to someone for a reading? How is one’s own forgetfulness of names related to the state choreographed amnesia? Just like the autocorrect function on the phone, the I slips to U and back. The reciprocity and interconnectedness of affect is epitomized in the lyrics, which continuously render the transitional modes of affecting and being affected. 

While the video channels display fleeting images recorded in transitional spaces such as airports and hallways, as words are laser-engraved into the celluloid of the film—questioning further the peripheries of our materialized skins, thoughts, and emotional worlds. "

Commissioned by Kevin Space and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo