In the beginning of 2017, Arthub would like to start our Screening Program in a different way. In Katy Roseland’s exhibition SHOW, she cooperates with artist Wang Rou (aka. Ray Tat) by showing his SHOW series.
Presenting:
SHOW
January 1 – 14, episode 1
January 15 – 21,episode 2, 3
January 22 – 29, episode 4, 5, 6
January 30 – February 5, episode 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
About the artwork:
Online interfaces are liberating as spaces, but can also give users a false sense of engagement. As a patient aims to name their ills, SHOW is evidence of the victimization of ones own narrative.
Put together from material generated from engagements with 网肉 WANG ROU’s network (online and offline), SHOW hypothesizes the internet as a paranoid’s corridor that strings together gestures of avoidance as an interpassive ‘life’ flow revolving around the desire for control one invests in a user name.
The name ‘ 网肉 Wang Rou’ and the fictional brand ‘Saito’ holds together the very same network that Wang Rou attempts to take apart, as the narrative that undermines him.
In exhibiting 11 episodes of SHOW over 4 weeks, we present this to you, a comedy of errors generated from the process of dividing yourself between IRL decay and sterile avoidance.
SPECULATIONS
by Katy Roseland
As we move to refine the term “Internet Art”, it’s vital to name specific mechanisms of the internet utilized as medium. For WANG ROU it becomes lengthy narrative derived from social transactions, the human facing side of online experience. As a continuous collection of digital souvenirs, SHOW is a collection trailing episodes down an online rabbit hole.
The work manifests in a moving archive of color, colorful in a way that discarded packaging collects. SHOW is layered images and sound, frames within frames, copy paste media, it’s a Ryan Trecartin “A family finds entertainment” scrapbook on film combined with the nostalgia of Paperrad aesthetics and crafted comedic timings.
Unsure where one story ends an another begins, the absence of conclusion suggests online experience as a durational performance. He edits in some sort of manic journaling ad infinitum. When you live online, there is no shortage of material as all actions are immediate archive. As passive receptors and transmitters of the most basic data, our online narratives become preconceived reality.
Spam and digital litter is what this work is composed from. Allocating his online interactions as a sort of content farming, “url friends” become characters in WANG ROU’s SHOW with their only commonality as WANG ROU himself. Performing from the stage of social media accounts center him as director, master of ceremony of his web based tribe.
Footage of his own mother appearing from episode 1 as well as references to the family dinner table allude to nesting in an online community, a family, further escaping agency of physical reality and burrowing deeper into a projected consciousness. Furthermore, placing the master in a position to be less and less present in the physical world and creates a dependency cycle of social network turned support system.
Found screenshots coupled with Ray Tat’s (Wang Rou’s born name) physical performance footage included in episode 10 and 11, himself lowering his face into a bed of hair and crying before his webcam, provide a glimpse into his characters’ self-depiction. As well screenshots layered over his portrait serve as a lens, identity based on external perceptions, the reactions of others whether prescribed to the artist, his character, or neither.
This is content generating as a means of control, navigating one’s own narrative despite the traps of social media algorithms. The call and response dynamics segments i.e. “stuff my ex said to me”… “stuff I said to my ex” are examples of systemized methods of communication via mechanized channels, not unlike the automation of artificial intelligence. This gives us a glimpse of what it’s like designing your own echo chamber or personal hell as the learned machine of your dreams.
Below is an interview between Katy Roseland and Wang Rou:
Katy Roseland (KR): SHOW is partly a moving bricolage of digital found objects. How many contributors are involved in your work? How do you select and extract media?
Wang Rou (WR): I started off with a video bank of scraps I had filmed and designed over the years; things animated on the fly, improvised sketches with people in my life, and low-fi music I’d recorded.
When it was time to edit, I started playing a game of detournement with the material – intuitively I knew that the point was not to identify with my original intentions and construct something digetical with the material, but to allude to a kind of performance ‘behind the scenes’, of a particular relationship to the internet.
The videos were originally uploaded on Youtube in serialized form. One video would come out while I was soliciting material for the next. Sometimes the construction of the videos would happen after they had been uploaded – a lot of the sequences were linked together textually via Youtube annotations, which I would revise as time progressed; When SHOW 2 was on Youtube, the armature of the whole video was textual, simultaneously contextualizing and linking sequences together. Show 2 started of being ‘held together’ by a conversation I had with my mom online, and ended up being a surreal illustration of an alternate history of The Soviet Union. The content didn’t matter, what was important was performing the malleability of the material.
“People can talk about cyberspace as a Utopian community only because it is literature, and therefore subject to editorial revision.” – Humdog
As I started running out of video in the video bank I started soliciting footage from people, either giving them directions of what to film or make, or re-editing material they had made before. Nothing contributed has not been altered or re-contextualized, save a contribution from David Shane Smith, aka Videa Gam, a musician from New York who went through the pains of recording green screen footage for me.
KR: Your practice involves lengthy online exchanges. Do you consider the process of creating SHOW more of performance or film making?
WR: It’s a form of interpassive theatre, a liminal state between acting and framing the production of gestures in a certain way.
KR: What are your notable inspirations for SHOW? How did this process begin?
WR: The process began even before I conceived of SHOW, working as a designer for a Malaysian children’s TV show. A year after I left my job, I aspired to make comedy. I decided to re-use some of the shoddy animation and graphics I had made for work as ad parodies. I also filmed some sequences with friends based on joke concepts. Of course, when it was time to edit everything things had changed and I wasn’t trying to be funny anymore.
People from my past have told me they laugh at the videos anyway, laughing in recognition, because they knew me.
KR: Is this work autobiographical?
WR: It’s the performance of someone trying to write autobiography, to tell a coherent life narrative, much like people who curate their Facebook profiles.
It is impossible to make life decisions while simultaneously living a life.
KR: There are a few running themes presented in the work; Altantuya, the image of your mother, Saito watch brand. What do these elements reference? How do they link?
WR: They are just jokes that never got fleshed out, when my intention was to still make sketch comedy.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
With equal amounts of care and cynicism, it should be noted that the conceit (and comedy) in Ray Tat’s video/ performance practice revolves around formalizations of subjective dispositions as a way of psychological avoidance – Instead of registering his own identity politics the artist will tell himself that he is performing the politics of identity. Instead of emoting, the subject will make a statement about emotions (insert thumbs up emoji here). Like thousands of other netizens prone to hysteria and heated exchanges online, Ray Tat often avoids processing subjective affect by displacing them as lingustic relations between himself and other users.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Katy Roseland lives between physical reality and algorithmic communities. Performing as a human chatbot for the last year has reduced discovery to automation. The act of sharing, sending and transaction is the duty of a curator and the position of every online user.
