Johnnie Ziyang Zheng

This work maybe is actually a joke which performed through a meaningless repeating action by colouring 1000 foam bricks and a nonsense photograph outcome: which is how we actually produce materials and how do we letting hilarious, simple photograph-visual thing take the first place.

I chose seven photos of the river outside my home, which represents the minimal cycle for settlement, seven days a week, and did an online search. Then I mixed my photos with similar image sources found online (which come from social platform, photo galleries, official sites, etc.) and further blurred the images. After the semantics generated by the images are abused and the subject of experience and viewing is reversed, the memories and thoughts of this river are also diluted in the process of replacing actual memories and emotional connections with algorithms and data. We have never had so many identical pictures, conceptually or factually. Therefore, the preciously recorded personally images are ironically, behovely diminished like waves merged into sea, the same way my hometown disappeared into the tide of the era. Everything we want to keep privately through images is no longer recordable or existent. Together with the memories and emotions of others, it turned into noise-like data, and disappeared in the sea of data.

However Prometheus empowered us to burn, yet we are only obsessed with the bonfire and the shadow in the cave. Images, as the waxy face of the deceased[1] , as the extension and reflection of the obsession[2], has been worshipped as eternity since the shape of the rock pile[3] was gazed in silence for a long time in the Paleolithic Age. I divided my work into three main bodies and separate references to form the overall structure, which serves as the expression of the gazing history and specific conditions. The mobile phone which mimics the gazing of the swinging shadow in the fire, the acrylic bricks which is printed with personal and public images covered by the red layer and the RGB color separate, the TV screen (using real-time projection) which displays the delayed scene of gazing and the real-time scene of happening simultaneously, respectively refers to the shadow of bonfire in Plato's cave theory (Allegory of the Cave), the object watching the images, and the rock pile from the Paleolithic Age. It could also refer to the almost identical recorded images in the unclear meaning of viewing (visually just the red and colored bricks with difference, while the text information is almost unreadable), the restoration of the materiality of the images seen (the red light in the darkroom first seen after the black and white photo is developed, the picture on the colored-screen occurred with the RGB principle), and the linear time model of the overall history of the future from when the viewing began till now till eternity[4]. Ironically, even at this moment, the viewing subject is turned into the mobile phone, and the first viewer becomes the translator of codes, from screen(the phone) to screen(the TV which mirror sreening ). Yet we are still watching silently, just as we were obsessed with the fire on the cave wall and the appearance of things.

[1] According to Regis Debray's "The Life and Death of Images", "the birth of images is partly linked to death. The reason why ancient images emerge from the tomb is precisely to reject nothingness and continue life. Shaping the body is to control fear. Therefore, as death gradually fades out of social life, the image becomes less vivid, and our need for images is less urgent." In Latin "Imago" originally meant a wax mold for the face of the deceased. The judge took it to the funeral, stored it at home, and placed it in an alcove or storage shelf in the atrium. The religion at that time was based on worshiping ancestors, and therefore required the ancestors to survive in the form of images. [3]Tombs began to appear in the late Paleolithic period, about 100,000 years ago. In 1908, a well-preserved Neanderthal tomb was found in a small cave in a cave in southwestern France, with intentionally placed stones next to the human bone. This tomb dates back to the Paleolithic age approximately 60,000 years ago. (This tomb is one of the earliest human tombs. Neanderthals are the first ancient humans to adopt the form of tombs with funerary objects, and have a funeral view of equal life and death.) [4]The linear time model here refers to the model called Minkowski's space-time time-understanding in physics: it was proposed by the German mathematician H. Minkowski in order to meet the needs of the special theory of relativity. In the classical concept of space-time, time and space is separate, the model of real space is a three-dimensional Euclidean space, while time is a one-dimensional number axis, and the simultaneity of the two events is absolute. [2]Susan Sontag's quotation of the cave metaphor in "On Photography": "We are still hanging around in the caves Plato said without progress. What makes us deeply indulged is still only some photos, not the facts themselves."