Four AM
Multimedia art exhibition
Collaborated with Leah Bian | summer 2021
The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.
The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.
— Wislawa Szymborska.
In human perception, four AM itself often exists in the form of vacancy, swallowed by distorted time and space in dreams, twisted between soberness and uncontrol. Yet such perception is not universal, among humans, and for other beings. Therefore, the artists went on a trip to capture and imagine. They hope to go beyond human thinking, re-establish resonance with all things, and look for where they belong. The project turned out to be a multi-media art exhibition composed of four installations.
The exhibition was held in Room 818, NYU Shanghai from August 13th to 14th 2021, and received more than 60 audiences.
Exhibition Full Video
I. Hours 时制
Mechanical installation
Materials: linen, 3D printing resin, acrylic, keel hangers, stepper motors, Arduino
Fluid, ever-shifting 25 hours compose this clock, filling one periodicity of day and night. You walk through this clock of elusive rules. Senses of the length of time are intuitive, and so are people’s positions in the linear time frame. Time perception smoothes experiences and feelings. The fragment at the edge of the clock is in muddy blue. It is the four AM, which lies between the crowding of night and day. The 25th hour disguised in grey, gently questions the quantifications in the 24-hour system.
II. The White Secret Words 呓语
Installation | Projection mapping
Materials: steel bed frame, cotton bedding, projector
An upside-down bed on which a pillow with a hole is accidentally broken. At four AM, the sleepless's thoughts and the dreamers' dreams poured out with the cotton in the pillow and intertwined disorderly. Gravity is elusive in such a picture, which is also in line with the sense of "space distortion" brought by the bed at four. The movement of words flowing out of the pillow can also be called another dream.
III. Nature-society 共生
Video installation
Materials: screens, stereo speakers, raspberry pi, plants
The videos were filmed in Jiuxi, Hangzhou around four AM on July 12, 2021. The camera captured the states and behaviors of natural lives in the mountains. Under the human circadian rhythm, four AM is a relatively repressed time. However, for other organisms living in symbiosis with one another, four AM can also be ordinary, saturated, and dynamic. The three states of "coincidence", "dependence" and "conflict" coexist and overlap, which are documented in three separate short films.
The artists observed the interactions between other natural lives as bystanders. The isolated "us" and the diverse "them" are unfamiliar to each other. On this land, human's position in natural relationships is still ambiguous.
IV. Hide and Seek 捉迷藏
Interactive installation
Materials: acrylic, plastic, holographic screens, projector, webcam