Guangli Liu

Drawing on the threads of Virtual Currency and Digital Junk, Very, Very, Tremendously seeks to discuss how the acts of production and consumption from the virtual world interact systematically with reality, whilst also mirrors how the ‘two realities’ coexist in geopolitical conflict.

Through a 3D virtual universe simulated by a game engine intertwined with historical pictures, a lost moment of history can be experienced. The story revolves around the memory of a Chinese survivor of Khmer Rouge. This tragedy, which took the lives of 2 million people, continues to reshape our present in virtue of today's narration.

Jade, a Korean-born art student, writes in her diary about encountering anti-Asian racism, sexism, and homophobia in France. Her disillusionment with France, her rage at racists, and the lack of understanding from others all prompted her to reconcile with reality through art.

The first films of Patagonia - where I grew up - show a territory that no longer exists, as the araucarias, millenary trees from the Patagonian forests, were in part replaced by more productive pines. Near my new home, in Belgium, I find araucarias that adorn front gardens. We hear some girls playing in the car, pointing out araucarias on the road. How did these plants become a petty-bourgeois fashion in northern Europe? I confront these archives with contemporary technoscientific images, used by a lab to explore plant modifications. What can these modes of representation tell us about our time?

To paraphrase Paul Celan’s poetry, words can be disappointing. Writers create texts, but according to Umberto Eco, texts are “lazy machineries” that require the collaboration of the reader to fill in the “gaps.” Misunderstandings are the result of different life experiences. When words cannot overcome thought barriers, music may circumvent logic as an immediate vibration and guide those who search for meaning.

The film stages quasi-clinical encounters between aphantasic individuals and an AI system, then re-films digital footage on 8mm to return synthetic vision to material fragility. Approximately 4% of the population has aphantasia, an inability to form visual images in the mind’s eye. They understand what an elephant is, what pink is, yet see nothing when they close their eyes. The film places this absence of inner images in dialogue with an AI system that produces images excessively, asking whether synthetic vision and human non-vision might reveal each other.

In Lengshuijiang, balanced in a space made up of official images, an audiovisual program presents itself as a taciturn witness of rigid, modulated, even aberrant moments in which China constantly tried to demonstrate its success through its own fresco, an atypical form in tone of virtual reality.

Now I understand that the more completely the dinosaurs were annihilated, the wider their domain extended. They not only controlled the forests that covered the continents, but also penetrated into the depths of human thought that remained on Earth. Starting from the ancient, fear and doubt inducing ancestors, they continuously stretched out their necks and raised their claws, expanding their domain.（Calvino "The Dinosaurs."）