Dark Beyond Deep

2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
17:40 minutes

In Dark Beyond Deep by Zhu Changquan the film presents the process of how consciousness gradually develops and extends from the real world to virtual space through a raven named Cyma. Cyma redefined things in the “digital garden” in the film by comparing them with the logic in reality. It opened a new passage for mutual reflection between objects in real life and the existence of digital objects in digital space. As digits are very rational, all the emotional imaginations in the work are based on extreme rationality. By reconstructing digits into visual and spatial videos or images through digital modeling, the artist makes the virtual world into a myriad of interconnected variables. The broken statement by Cyma in the video creates spaces for the audience to develop their answers from their perspectives. One experience unfolds and extends to another experience. As human beings, it is also the cumulation of countless experiences which shaped us into individuals with different souls. The vivid and random movements in the digital garden contrast with the logical and rational thinking behind it. The work opens a new question of virtual reality in the coming 5G era.

Zhu Changquan engages in artistic activities through analyzing everyday life. He attempts to reveal the rules of daily life based on a variety of potential factors which influence human’s daily behavior. He believes that the effectiveness of the image roots in its potential power rather than its general meanings. The potential power enables the viewers to release their accumulated experience, and get involved in the giant social machinery more consciously. In Zhu Changquan’s work, the development of things never follows a single-linear narrative. “All-factor Narrative” marks the central notion of his video works. He builds a new narrative relation between intangible images and tangible daily objects by means of different languages, such as drama, animation, installation, painting, and etc. He adopts the use of “optical substitutes”— photography, moving images, or virtual technology— to rebuild the visual fragments that he finds to be profound into a virtual reality. In his works, the virtual creations cast shadows of the material world, setting up a correspondence between the “real-virtual dyad” which the artist has then appropriated into other relationships between the physical and virtual worlds.

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