Screened at “Simularca Unveiled: Digital Bodies Final Showcase” at 370 Jay St
“Exit Status” is a phrase from coding that refers to a value returned by a program that indicates whether the program completed successfully or encountered an error. When it is “exit status 1”, it means that it encounters an error. And when it is “exit status 0”, it means that the program went through. Since I want to preserve a mystical quality for the ending to be open for interpretation, I did not indicate which state it is. Not knowing what is awaiting in front, tranquility or turmoil? It also strengthens my desire to freeze time now, even if the body lies in a pool of ruins, it still is in a state of security and comfort as opposed to the unknown.
Scans as Ruins
“Like modernity, nostalgia has a utopian element, but it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways” (“Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins”, Boym). Ruins, in modern days, are shifting towards a generalized symbol of “vanishing materiality” as opposed to a destroyed object with historical contexts. They become separate things when the past context fades away and when the future hasn’t come.
In the film, I used 3d scans of passing moments as ruins, deleting its texture but keeping the structure. The contained information is gone yet the overall figure remains. Just as how ruins became a modern element, without implying the past or present or future, but the signs of decaying.
Inspirations
“The Crystal Land” by Robert Smithson
“Cracked, broken, shattered; the walls threatened to come crashing down. Fragmentation, corrosion, decomposition, disintegration, rock creep, debris slides, mud flow, avalanche were everywhere in evidence […] A chaos of cracks surrounded us”.
This essay is the start of my inspiration for this project, as a fantastical narrative, it creates vivid details about the narrator traveling through a strange land and encountering various landscapes. Smithson describes not only objects or materials but also a concept of natural formation and leftover existences through time. In my blog post I wrote “To me it feels like a compression of time and variance. It is a space of palimpsest”. This idea of a palimpsest stuck with me from the beginning of the course, as how everything we see, including buildings and streets and even nature, is a temporary state in the long stream of time. The ephemeral qualities of things makes preserving even harder. Ice is a short-lived crystal, a temporary pause of time, but more so a decaying object. Inspired by its fleeting nature, in the film I tried to preserve an eternal world where the fading processes are paused, as they are inside a crystal.
“Time Passes” from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
"Will you fade? Will you perish?”
A short but striking quote that touches the essence of existence. It is also a question that I like to pose in the film. The pieces of ruins and the human bodies are stuck in their positions, neither fading or perishing. It is paused, but the future of it is open-ended. As time passes, the house decayed into ruins and tiny snippets of memories and feelings flew past it. We thought we see the past, but it is gone again the next moment.