The Moon Also Rises

2022 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

20:00 minutes

Yuyan Wang

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The Moon Also Rises by Yuyan Wang comprises a one-channel video and light installation. The work is based on a 2018 initiative in China to launch three artificial moons into orbit above major cities to provide continuous daylight. Set in an oppressively illuminated environment, the images depict lethargic crowds in megacities, surrounded by glowing neon lights, and workers in LED factories performing repetitive tasks on an assembly line in a kind of trance state. Wang depicts the imposition of relentless light as a form of capitalist authoritarianism and neocolonial control that demands ceaseless productivity, while ignoring the ecological and human damage inflicted by the renunciation of darkness. Édouard Glissant’s call for “le droit à l’opacité” (the right to opacity), a form of postcolonial resistance, inspired this project. The Moon Also Rises portrays a nocturnal community based on overpowered efficiency—a community active, available, and connected, where the mysterious zones are replaced by a homogeneous brightness. Under the authority of everlasting lights, the film depicts the capitalist myth—the immateriality of new technologies and tries to trace the “light” back to its terrestrial origins.

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Yuyan Wang is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work examines images at the point of production and the atmosphere cultivated by media regimes within the attention economy. Both poetic and political, her productions underscore the diversity of the effectual matrix that exists between suspense and action. Her practice of image recycling is a kind of détournement that forms the basis of complex, immersive environments, inverting and subverting the functions and meanings of the images used. Employing montage, sound, and acceleration, she alternately creates focus from distraction, and ambiguity from clarity.

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Colors:

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• artificial.a.01
• urbanity.n.02
• capitalism.n.01
• colonialism.n.01
• community.n.01
• technology.n.01
• productiveness.n.01