Category: Hypercinema

       “Christine Sun Kim: The World Is Sound” is one eight-minute video by artist Christine Sum Kim. In this video, she describes some artwork of her series “the sound of”. The video has no sound, Christine used sign language and caption to convey her ideas. She illustrated five artwork of series “the sound of”, including passing time, temperature rising, and waiting room, by showing the idea of each piece, the meaning of musical signs in the artwork and her feeling in such situations.

       Christine used nothing but a sequence of three musical signs, f, p, and sfz, to represent the sound of different things. With the combination of musical signs, the amount, and the frequency of each note, she conveyed the tense and smoothing emotion. One novel idea is that she found a way to produce and represent sounds for those events that normally has no sound. For example, time passing, and temperature rising are events that does not have a concrete form, more like a concept rather than something we can actually hear or see. However, using merely musical signs on the paper, Christine presented these events using a combination of vision and auditory, the audience could understand the event by “seeing the sound”.

       To me personally, I found two points most amazing in this video. First is that the video itself has no sound, no people speaking nor background music, while the video is talking about sound all the time. This contradiction separates the ideas of hearing the sound and perceiving the sound. Although I heard nothing, I can somehow feel the sound that is discussed in the video. This let me think about the form of sounds. Is hearing the only way for one to perceive sound, or if visions and feelings can also provide enough information for the audience to receive sounds. So that the sound does not come from the outside world but is generated from our brains. The second striking point is how sound is able to describe something abstract, something does not necessarily have a sound. As in “the sound of temperature rising”, she gives appropriate and vivid sound to the concept of temperature rising and showed the motion and changes of such an abstract concept. These artworks lightened the point for me that how senses can be used to describe seemly irrelevant ideas and events.

       In short, I think this video and the several artworks in the video very creative and inspiring, as they provided me many new thoughts about auditory and sound.

Reference

Christine Sun Kim. “The World Is Sound”. Youtube.Com, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vU4TCKxZlc&t=180s.

 

       La Jetee is one 28 minutes French film directed by Chris Marker in 1962. This film is made up with sequential black and white still images along with the voice of a narrator and other background music. La Jetee presents a story about a man who was forced to make time travels in his dreams to the past and the future because his unique strong memory of a certain moment. During such time travels, he met a destined girl and made a choice between the future and the past. The story ends with the main character going back in time and dying in front of his younger self.

       The film starts and ends with the same scene of the airport, where the protagonist died in front of himself. This scene is also mentioned and showed several times in the middle of the film. This repetition illustrates the time travel core of the film, that he jumped back in time to repeat this memory. The continuous emphasize of the airport scene also provides the idea that the whole story is based on this certain moment; the story would not go very far without pointing back to the origin. This feeling of foundation is just in line with the story logic, that nothing would happen without the main character’s memory about the scene, and everything goes back to this very scene.

       Besides the scene setting, I am most fascinated by two aspects of the film. The first is the story of time travel. Without knowing any plot before, I was amazed by the story and the twists in it. There are several moments that I felt striking, for example, the moment when the main character succeeded in travelling back in his dream, the moment when he chose to go back instead of to the peace future, and the moment when he died at last. Such twists involve not only the idea of time travel, but also the emotion and feelings of the character. The film succeeded to present a whole and detailed story in less than thirty minutes. And this led to the second aspect, the story telling.

       The film used only black and white still images, such images could provide much less information than moving ones. However, I feel that the film did a great job in providing everything the audience need to know, while left some marginalized details to be imagined by the audience themselves. I think one important feature for the film to deliver massage besides the still image is the audio. There is light music in peaceful scenes and strong heartbeats in tense situations. The audio conveys exact emotions and flows of the story, providing sensual information that the still image failed to achieve.

       In general, I do personally find the film La Jetee very fascinating and inspiring.

 

Reference: Marker, Chris. La Jetee. 1962.

“Have you make it back here?”

Response to The Danger of a Single Story

       In the video, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illustrates single story with examples such as her impression to the house boy, her American roommate’s impression to African, and her impression to Mexico. All these impressions are single sided, with only one characteristic, which forms a seriously biased stereotype. The only story brings no benefits to both the stereotype holder and the one who lives in the single story.

       Though not deeply explained, Adichie links the reason of single story to power. She argues that power has the ability to decide what to tell and how to tell, thus creating a single-sided story and making it to be the only story. I do agree that power can be an important factor for single stories, just as all those samples above involves a difference in powers, Adichie’s family owns power over the house boy and America owns power over Africa and Mexico. However, I do think that the word of “power” might be too vague as the factor of single stories. Time can be one reason of single stories, a story being told repeatedly over a long time could be convincible; lack of information can be one reason of single stories, one is exposed to nothing but a single piece of knowledge about another might just take it for granted.

But no matter is power, time, or lack of information, they are not easy to deal with, to avoid the single story. It might seem that information would be solvable, as Internet contains everything. It is true for big notions like Mexico, but when it comes to a person, or a small incident, we might just have no other information source but that single story.

Adichie promotes us to have “many story”, to break the danger of single story. This must be the first right solution for single story, but I think that we do not necessarily have the chance to gain “many story”. We are exposed to millions of news and information every day, there is no way for us to distinguish every piece whether it is single-sided and then try to find the other perspectives. I think the easier way to deal with the danger of single story, is to presume every piece of story I heard to be a single-sided one. Without further confirmation, I should not conclude the single characteristic or single reason to be the only one and the definitive one. If I hold the thought that every random story can be single-sided, then I would not spread them without confirmation, and I would not be reluctant to face other perspectives of the event when I met them. I shall be happy to know that I am no longer single sided, but maybe in a situation of “two story”.

Response to Trans Women and The Danger of a Single Story

       In Cassie Blighter’s writing, besides other discussion towards gender, she points out that Adichie fell into the trap of single story. It seems very irony that the very person who illustrated the danger of single story failed to live up to it. Adichie took it for granted that trans women has better childhood experience than cis women as they once preceded the privilege of men. Adichie did not thought about trans women who were abused in their childhood for not being masculine, and all other suffers they experienced.

       Adichie made one response based on the knowledge she had, however ignored that possibility that the knowledge is a single story. This behavior brought back to the previous point I mentioned, that if we assume the information might be single-sided at the first place, then we might not just jump to a conclusion so quickly without thinking about other possibilities.

Reference

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger Of A Single Story”. Ted.Com, 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en&subtitle=zh-cn.

 

Brighter, Cassie. “Trans Women And The Danger Of A Single Story — Where Chimamanda Got It Wrong”. Medium, 2018, https://medium.com/empowered-trans-woman/trans-women-and-the-danger-of-a-single-story-where-chimamanda-got-it-wrong-a6347d015d0b.