Jet Folder & Data Tree
2013 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Lin Ke
Jet Folder & Data Tree (2013) offers a humorous take on how computer and screen-based technologies affect our relationship to the natural world. In a statement through his gallery, Gallery Yang, Lin remarks that “one day in 2010, I discovered that the folders in my computer began talking to me. So I created lots of empty folders with no content but name.” Lin’s print, by extension, functions as a collage in which screen-based media becomes part of the natural world, and vice versa. By superimposing computer icons over “real” objects like airplanes or leaves in his photographs, Lin parodies familiar assumptions that photograph documents the real world by revealing the relative ease of manipulating the medium. At the same time, he also suggests that our increasing reliance on screen-based technologies affects our perception and relationship to the natural world. In Lin’s rendering, we can only see the natural world through the layer of a computer-based intervention, suggesting a much more trenchant divide between false and physical realities.
Lin Ke’s video and media-based installations explore how perceptual experiences of our surrounding environments are mediated and altered by various technologies. Computer operating systems, social media platforms, and screen displays become objects of aesthetic inquiry in his work, and his practice is deeply invested in the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Lin’s work offers various insights on contemporary iterations of virtual reality and the ways in which computer-based media affects our physical relationship to our own bodies by warping our sense of time, space, and stimulation. Boredom is a recurring theme throughout his work and plays on larger metaphors of disconnection from both interpersonal interactions and real space.
