I M EVERYWHERE, Year: 2018
Video excerpt at SITE gallery Four, Oh Four!,
Duration：4:04 minutes
“I M EVERYWHERE” is a text-based mixed media installation, the audio is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from underground.
It consists of seven parts: M1 to M7 with each representing seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, speaking and writing, respectively.
The first five parts explore human subjectivity by consciously suppressing the senses. The underground man in Dostoevsky’s novel tries to rebel against both reason and desire to achieve absolute freedom. I extended this theme to human perception, studied via conscious suppression of senses to address the narrator’s notion of absolute freedom(freedom from both reason and desire) , and by raising questions: Can we limit our perception, and therefore transcend it? Since our senses are given, and feelings are triggered through our senses, can “I” exist beyond perceptions, or can we choose not to feel through our senses? Or can we only exist under the restrictions of our perception, and to what extent are we “free”?
The last two parts respond directly to subjectivity, as discussed in the book. M6 removes all the subjective words in the novel and records the computer recitation of the edited text. M7 writes all the deleted words with an unusable pen on the back of the text. By performing these action of deleting “self”, the works achieve the literal meaning of “non-self”. However, at the same time, “I” am everywhere.
The following texts are showing on the monitors:
M1: “Seeing- Eyes covered with an eye-mask then read the text. (Participant is aware of the content)”
M2: “Hearing- Using noise-canceling headphones while listening to noise muted.”
M3: “Smelling- Wearing a nose clip while smelling the text.”
M4: “Touching- Fail.”
M5: “Tasting- Apply a common cold or more serious medical condition involving the central nervous system.”
M6: “Speaking- Erase all subjective words.”
M7: “Writing- Write the words extracted form Notes from Underground with a broken pen.”