David Court
Living the Image: Looking at Yam Lau’s Scapeland
- Yam Lau, Scapeland II
- YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, 8 March to 19 April 2008
Somewhere in The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, that peculiar philosopher of daydreams, observes that “often when we think we describe we merely imagine.”1 With this statement Bachelard articulates a basic complication in our engagement with the world, a complication increasingly entangled in the currents of global digital networks and the conventions of computer-mediated communication, in the movements and modulations between bodies, technology, and the world. I am thinking about this as I begin to describe an encounter with Toronto-based artist Yam Lau’s recent work Scapeland II, as it was installed at the YYZ Artist’s Outlet in Toronto this past spring.
Scapeland II is one of a number of works Lau has produced in recent years that explore the potential in digital animation and 3D-modelling for new modes of expression, constructing complicated virtual spaces that push installation-based video projection into murky ontological territory. In the animation, a virtual camera presents a view into a virtual space in which there appear four video “projections,” arranged on a kind of cubic armature, along with some other virtual objects: a tree and some rocks. The videos, four separate views of a rocky landscape near a body of water, appear as though projected onto something like a curtain or veil, a transparent material undulating in a virtual wind with a similar rhythm and force as the wind that blows across the water in the videos. Here, a complication emerges: within the logic of the digital, there can be no separation between the video, the veil, and the wind; nor can the videos be understood on the terms of actual projection, where an image is projected onto a surface by a focussed light source. They are, simply, a composition of information into a particular appearance. There are no curtains and there is no wind; there is simply the appearance of an image.
But what about this word “virtual”? It is a convention, at this point, to refer to any computer-generated space or object as a “virtual” space or a “virtual” object. While this is not exactly inaccurate, it seems to point away from an understanding of the virtual as a modality of perception. “Virtual” does not describe an object so much as it expresses a relation, a movement. When I refer to the images/objects in Scapeland II in terms of the virtual, I am describing an action or affect more than I am making any ontological claims for the digital image, as the virtual appears to destabilize the very ground on which such claims are possible. This can be felt in the ontological instability of the video/veil/wind “projections”: the impossibility of their appearance as things-in-the-world and my inability to untangle this knot of image/object/force.
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About this Article
Living the Image: Looking at Yam Lau’s Scapeland was first published in Fillip 8 in Fall 2008. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
David Court is a Toronto-based artist and writer, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. His work engages contemporary media experience within the context of aesthetic discourse and new media theory.
Notes
image: Yam Lau, Scapeland II, 2008. Video installation, detail. Courtesy of the artist and YYZ Artists Outlet, Toronto
The views expressed in Fillip are not necessarily those of the editorial board or the Projectile Publishing Society.
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