Lightning01

2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lin Ke

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Lightning 01 (2014) parodies our contemporary relationship to screen-based media and the absurdity of aestheticizing boredom. The video depicts a computer user aimlessly taking photos of himself, seemingly numb to external stimuli or intervention. Set on a loop, the video produces the illusion of an endless state of bored selfies and disaffected gazes. None of the user’s Photo Booth images, however, materialize in the video: instead, we are faced with that unchanging night sky picture and a sense of a “natural” expanse in contrast to the “artificial” claustrophobia of the user’s video feed from his room. In gesturing towards the pervasiveness of screen-based cultures in our contemporary moment, Lin’s video offers a humorous comment on the inherent insularity of networking platforms like Snapchat and Skype by showing us a video feed of a user that we can never engage or communicate with. By extension, Lin also suggests that these modes of imaging produce a false sense of reality and similarly reflects on how media-based technologies further disconnect us from our natural environments. Lin believes that it is all too easy to become complacent and allow ourselves to become absorbed by our devices: a computer camera’s flash is no substitute for lightning, and a picture of moon lit clouds cannot replace the experience of seeing an actual night sky. Lin suggests that it is not enough to accept these mediated representations as genuine moments of witness, and Lightning 01 serves as a reminder to disconnect from the repetitiveness of media-based immersions and to seek out those expanses beyond our own screens.

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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.

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