Ivy Chen

This project is a 20s work interwoven by image sequence, video, rotoscoping and sound. It is afast-paced video with multiple channels popping up on the screen.

This project was started with exploration on the relationship between outer and inner noise. The concept was further refined to traffic noise, which accompany with me in daily life. People’s inner noise such as anxiety and anger and traffic noise feed on and intensify each other. Traffic noise is a reflection of collective anxiety irritability, and traffic signal is a significant element on the road that drives people crazy especially in the few seconds before it turns red. This work is an attempt to mirror people’s inner mad and noise by synthesizing external noises such as images, sound and videos. Experimental audio is also be added into the video to enhance the expression. In order to integrate my idea with my image sequence, I experimented with unifying the color of the image, and layering images with video. Inspired by the way how artists use colors to express moods and feelings, such as Edvard Munch and Rashid Johnson, I picked Traffic Red as tone of highlight and grey as shadow tone in this work, aiming to transfer an irritable and anxious mood on the crowed road.

Furthermore, I drew inspirations from Douglas Gordon’s video installation work, 24 Hours Psycho. He distorted a thriller film ‘Psycho’ (110 min) by Alfred Hitchcock into a 24hour-long film to make the audience feel the process of exaggeration and deconstruction of tension. Inspired by this work, I raised the pace of my video to build a tense and anxiety atmosphere. Apart from this, the film Very Nice, Very Nice by Arthur Lipsett also inspired me of how to link different images together. He uses a series of extreme close-up portraits and cityscape photos with voice over to create a narration. Instead of using voiceover, I used Garage Band to imitate the sound coming out from the tap, which is a metaphor for the tidal traffic. At the end of the video, the sound of the water gradually subsides to imitate the tap being turned off, which iscontrasted with the traffic light turning red and passengers have to stop traveling. Different from Lipsett’s work, I shot those people in my work from a distance to create a third-person perspective. These remote shots and low-pixel magnification mimic the working principle of surveillance cameras.

The way I composite this work comes from my observation on the road, that when people try to run the red light, they would be captured by the surveillance camera and their portraits will be projected on the surveillance screen at the intersection with their eyes being blurred out. The idea about surveillance camera refers to Song Dong’s film Dragonfly Eyes, who created a fictitious narrative with footages from surveillance camera.