Fake Near Death Experience

I had been a fan of survival games and I liked to shoot BB gun for fun in abandoned factories with friends in late night.

One summer night we found an abandoned factory in an industrial park. The folly was shrouded in night, like a scene of ruins after the end of the world. We intruded it excitedly, thinking this was a perfect site to have a good fight.

There were many water sinks as deep as a person's height, filled with rain water. Over the surface was a thick layer of dust, in the still air of summer night without any illuminant but torch lights, they looked like solid concrete.

In the beginning of the fight I was leading the advance bravely, but unexpectedly I fell into one of the sinks. My teammates behind me panicked when witnessing my sudden disappearance, they shed light on where they lost the trace of me. As to me, I fell into the still water during full speed running, and the rain water warmed by sunlight not long ago felt like the amniotic fluid in mother's womb. Floating, I was weightless, carried by the turbid water as cozy as in my mother's belly. It was quiet, light beams flashed over my head, a scene exactly same to the stories I had heard about dying.

It must have lasted more than ten seconds before I was fished out by my teammates. This accident has become a good story passed on by survival game players, and the moment of losing consciousness became a seed of wonder in my mind. It's a moment that I dropped from a world I knew into a world of mystery. I can't explain how this accident has affected me, but it's an experience I keep pursuing in my art ever since.

Concept of Creation

The word "Guanyin" (the Chinese title of this work) means to read sound with eyes.

The greatest pleasure and the highest state of creation is to create one thing that had never been thought of. Facing the thing I had produced, I don't know how to feel it; watching with my eyes, listening with my ears, tasting with my tongue or touching it with my fingers? I am curious and delighted to experience building up a connection between my feelings and this thing gradually and secretly.

This project attempts to present such an experience: An eye imitates the movements of lips to speak, each word is pronounced in a much longer sound, like mumbling.

 

Explanation of Interactivity

Pressing the keys of the antique typewriter, two mechanically connected organs are activated- the mouth and the eye. Each of the twenty-six letters corresponds to a word about physical senses, and when these words are inlaid into sentences, their meanings are changed. For example, "mother tongue" means one's native language.

The machine over the mouth moves according to the shape of lips while speaking out these words, and the machine over the eye repeats it, like the eye is chewing when it observes the activities of the mouth.