Friday, October 26, 2007

VISTA LAB 1.0: IMPETUS on Youtube



Our first workshop presentation, caught in rapid-succession photo stills. Check out Ka Fai's other Youtube trailers here.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

*History/Time, Signal/Noise*


In many languages, the word for "history" is the same as the word for "story". In German, both are called "Geschichte", in French, they are "l'histoire".


History can therefore be seen as a science of storytelling: the process of recalling the semi-random events of the world and constructing an order in which they make sense: in which they have meaning.

Something similar happens in electronics. A radio, television set or satellite receiver must tap into a sea of electromagnetic waves to retrieve the pattern of a message: idea from chaos, a signal amidst the noise.

If history is signal, then time itself must be recognised as noise: an infinitely complex mess of data that resists interpretation.

Our project is therefore to listen to the noise of history, moments which yield no discernible signal: the insignificant events.

Herein lies a paradox. As artists, as humans, we have a natural impulse to transmute chaos into art.

Is our goal then to reclaim the forgotten into the field of recorded time?

Or should we resist, in our representations of insignificant events, our instinct to render them significant?

VISTA Lab 2.0

First workshop in preparation for the next installment of VISTA! Joining us to collaborate (i.e. not involved directly in the previous production) are engineer Khoo Eng Tat, fashion designer Grace Ng and traditional Chinese musician Lim Hock Siang.

We had a discussion...


A show and tell...


An improv...


...and a post-mortem. :D