The Machine

"The Machine" was completed in 2012. It consists of two simple, fan-like machines and two projectors on two tables with a computer. One projector faces to the other one, as do the fan machines. A two-channel, three-section video is playing in a loop, and projected to two facing walls. During each section two different music videos are played at the same time. The six music videos all relate to the prison theme, and are distorted in playing speed: from Elvis Presley’s classic Jailhouse Rock in 1957 through Michael Jackson’s They Don't Care About Us (the prison version), to Lady Gaga’s best selling single Telephone etc. The fans spin at random speed when the videos are playing and therefore interrupt the video projection with their shadows as well as the rich, changing reflections from their double-sided-mirror blades. The work intentionally positions the spectators between the facing walls and so challenges their way of observing: they instinctively switch from watching one wall to another from time to time.

The piece tries to bring about the realization of power in the real punishment system, which has been used so many times in the entertainment culture, up to our present moment. Here the way to approach the issue of alienation in the media is by utilizing the media’s power to subversively undermine this power itself. Meanwhile the two physical machines rudely bring some sense of the real world into the scene. The arrangement makes the distorted images and music offer a critical perspective on each other through the tension in the argument and the chorus of those jail music’s soundtracks. All these parts finally form a big new “machine” in which the concept of the music video is completely deconstructed. What the piece cares about is not the punishment system that is always waiting at the edge of our society, but the twisting lens, which the media adds between the punishment system and the popular awareness of it—the place where alienation begins.

This “interruption” to the never-ending, distortive process of media can be taken as a metaphor for the role of art in this area: it can never be able to completely destroy the media’s mechanism of alienation, but can only interrupt it and bring some awareness of it, if only for a brief while.