1. Marina Abramović’s Work
The Life , 2019
The Life — a 19-minute performance realised through volumetric capture and presented in Mixed Reality — was the first large-scale public exhibition of anything in this new medium.
I find it interesting to use augmented reality technology to turn the very presence of an artist into a collectible artwork. However, I think this piece mainly relies on the artist’s fame and the novelty of applying new technology to art as its selling points. Personally, I prefer her 2010 work The Artist Is Present. This piece uses silent eye contact to convey the tension between people, which reminds me of the word “gravity.” It is a dialogue and fusion between the aura of the artist and the viewer.
The Artist Is Present, 2010
2. Dolly Zoom
The dolly zoom creates the illusion of a changing distance between two objects through a combination of zooming and adjusting the camera’s distance. This technique effectively conveys a character’s inner tension by shaping an irrational perception of spatial distance. I’ve also seen this technique used in old sci-fi films without CGI to create a scene like “shrinking a spaceship down to a nano-scale.” I have a personal connection with this technique. In a TRS course project during my freshman year, I accidentally discovered and intentionally used this technique to create a project about the perception of distance. At the time, I had never heard of the dolly zoom and didn’t know what it was. It was only later, when I learned about the work Serene Velocity, that I realized I had a similar approach to that piece, though I was 50 years late.
3. The Encounter of Two High-Speed Trains
I absolutely, absolutely, absolutely love this work. It is a piece that captures the chance encounter of two high-speed trains running parallel to each other purely by coincidence. I highly, highly, highly recommend others to watch it. I believe it is one of the best examples of what this project represents.
The two trains run parallel, overlapping repeatedly; in the darkness, every brightly lit window frames a diverse array of human figures. It is a grand collective memory, where many small individuals live their vivid lives in this era of Chinese high-speed rail. In a sense, it resembles life itself: traveling alongside many others, sometimes in sync, sometimes surpassing them, sometimes drifting apart, and ultimately, we part ways.
High-speed rail is a significant symbol of this era in China. During the 2024 Spring Festival travel rush—a short period of massive population movement as people return to their hometowns—the national rail system is expected to transport 480 million passengers. High-speed rail has become a symbol connecting “development” and “home.”
Whenever I’m on a train and experience an encounter like the one in the video, I always wave vigorously to the other train. Sometimes, there is someone waving back; more often, no one notices at all, but I don’t mind. Because I understand that people meet by chance, then part ways, never to see each other again. It is one of the most ordinary things in life. If you have ever encountered someone waving to you when the trains crossed, that fleeting moment might have been the only intersection in your entire lives.
(Here is the original video link. The original video is on Bilibili, which is kind of like YouTube in China, with 4.5 million views. The version on YouTube is a re-upload by someone else, and the video quality is very low.)