{"id":4390,"date":"2023-05-23T21:57:42","date_gmt":"2023-05-23T13:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acas.world\/?p=4390"},"modified":"2023-05-29T15:06:22","modified_gmt":"2023-05-29T07:06:22","slug":"animation-and-the-obsolescence-of-the-image-on-hong-kong-cityscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acas.world\/ja\/2023\/05\/23\/animation-and-the-obsolescence-of-the-image-on-hong-kong-cityscape\/","title":{"rendered":"Animation, the Obsolescence of the Image, and the Disappearance of Hong Kong Architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Yomi Braester<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this essay I hope to provoke scholars of animation into considering the role of time, both cinematic time and historical time. Like other genres of the moving image, animation often has at its core the disappearance of the image \u2014 an anticipated, even planned obsolescence. I examine here works exhibited as lightshows on the Hong Kong\u2019s International Commerce Centre (ICC) fa\u00e7ade between 2014\u20132016; these animations point explicitly toward the moment when the medium degrades and even vanishes.<\/p>\n

Film relies on the ephemerality of perception, as images succeed each other, 24 times per second or even faster. The transition from one frame to the next is what allows for animation \u2014 designing one frame at a time, and animating the image by showing the frames in sequence. In this sense, animation is bound to the scale of the frame. However, we may also think at other magnitudes. At the size of an entire work, what matters is the speed with which the film hurtles toward its inevitable end \u2014 and possibly toward an afterlife in remediated and redistributed forms. In blown-up displays, in which the single pixel is visible to the viewer, the image expires also at the resolution of the pixel, many times within each frame. More than we have acknowledged, animation works pay attention to the possibilities opened up by calibrating these proportions up and down.<\/p>\n

To give a sense of how animation may convey the ephemerality of the medium, I turn to Fly High \u2014 Time Flies<\/em>. This 6-minute-and-40-second-long work was designed by Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer, and exhibited over the ICC Tower in 2016. The artists describe the piece as follows:<\/p>\n

Our times are characterized by transience, impermanence and change. The computer-generated sequence Fly High \u2014 Time Flies<\/em> is composed of a swarm of artificial flies. They slowly appear, propagate and gradually invade the whole ICC Tower, before flying away again. Short swarming sequences and text messages with various plays on words around the terms fly, flies, may, sky, high, times, and life will appear. These messages remind us of the ephemeral moment. Just like a mayfly, they symbolize time passing by.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

Fly High \u2014 Time Flies <\/em>matches content with form. The artwork conveys the passing of time by using the unique specifications of the ICC fa\u00e7ade \u2014 a monochrome display with a very low resolution. From top to bottom, there are only 140 lines of LEDs, positioned roughly 4 meters apart. Each pixel is an LED screen a few inches wide. The full display is equivalent to 359\u00d7783 pixels. Fly High \u2014 Time Flies <\/em>represents each fly by one or two pixels, resulting in an animation that borders on a nonfigurative display. The resolution becomes even lower \u2014 encompassing the whole  fa\u00e7ade \u2014 when the flies swarm in and out, at times lighting almost the entire building, or alternatively leaving it darkened against the night sky. Fly High \u2014 Time Flies <\/em>brings to the surface the medium \u2014 the digital pixel and the building fa\u00e7ade \u2014 reducing the animation to light and dark, existence and disappearance (see the video below).<\/p>\n

https:\/\/acas.world\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/FlyHigh-TimeFlies-In-HongKong-ICC-TowerV2.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n

Another game of shadows is found in City Paths<\/em> \u57ce\u5e02\u8ecc\u8de1, by Chung Ka Hei, Pan Shihang, and Dorothy Ka Chung Wong (2016). City Paths<\/em> effectively creates the illusion that the ICC Tower is pulsating and gyrating. Urban screens have often aimed at this effect of \u201cliquid architecture,\u201d which Nanna Verhoeff describes as an \u201calmost literal blending of material and virtual spaces.\u201d[2]<\/a> The creators of City Paths<\/em> state that the geometric lines and flows reflect the pulsating energy of Hong Kong. The animation alludes to the fleeting nature of urban life by relying on a trompe-l’\u0153il that suggests the disappearance of both architecture and medium.<\/p>\n

These two quick examples demonstrate how animation may foreground the material conditions of their existence and at the same time point out their precarity. Paola Voci claims that recent animation returns to the early Chinese conception of film as \u201celectric shadows,\u201d engag[ing] with the digital medium but reclaim[ing] the same de-technologized human dexterity, tangible materiality.\u201d[3]<\/a> In other words, animation preserves a proximity to its material means of production. For Voci, animation is therefore a more tactile, embodied form of cinema. However, Fly High \u2014 Time Flies <\/em>and City<\/em> Paths <\/em>show that animation can also signal a radical departure from concrete space and time. The cinematic screen \u2014 even if it\u2019s one of the tallest skyscrapers in the world \u2014 can melt into the air, and with it the cinematic image.<\/p>\n

The figures of vanishing, obsolescence, and death in cinema have been foregrounded by the transition to digital and \u201cnew\u201d media. Laura Mulvey has noted in Death 24 Times a Second<\/em> that with the advent of video in the late 1970s, and even more so with digital technology, the viewing experience often relies on watching frozen and repeated images. Mulvey writes:<\/p>\n

As the new stillness is enhanced by the weight that the cinema\u2019s past has acquired with the passing time, its significance goes beyond the image itself towards the problem of time, its passing, and how it is represented or preserved. At a time when new technologies seem to hurry ideas and their representations at full tilt towards the future, to stop and to reflect on the cinema and its history also offers the opportunity to think about how time might be understood within wider, contested, patterns of history and mythology.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

Mulvey does not give thought to animation; in fact, she defines all cinema as \u201cthe mechanical animation of the inanimate.\u201d[5]<\/a> And yet, Mulvey\u2019s comments are especially relevant for animation. She suggests that the expiration of the single frame also translates into the obsolescence of the image as a historical index and a sign of the history of the cinematic medium. Focusing on the frame as the basic cinematic building brick portends the death of the image, in the material and media-historical senses.<\/p>\n

The ICC lightshows drive home the connection between the digital apparatus and the passing of time. As I have noted, the content of these animations cannot be separated from the medium \u2014 that is, the fa\u00e7ade of ICC, a 118-storey, 484-meter-tall building in West Kowloon. The entire building serves as a giant screen, with Hong Kong as an open-air theater for the spectacle. ICC\u2019s height and location near the waterfront make it visible around town and across the bay. ICC is not only Hong Kong\u2019s most prominent piece of architecture, but also the city government\u2019s flagship platform for urban art, as part of branding the city.<\/p>\n

Soon after its completion in 2010, a collaboration was established in 2012 between the City University of Hong Kong, ICC, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and in 2016 also with the International Symposium on Electronic Art. The resulting Open Sky Project was helmed by Maurice Benayoun, a CUHK professor and renowned new media artist. The so-called Open Sky Gallery exhibited short works designed for the ICC fa\u00e7ade in three annual rounds, between 2014 and 2016. Fly High \u2014 Time Flies<\/em> and City Paths <\/em>were part of the third Open Sky Project, showing between May 20 and July 4, 2016.<\/p>\n

The Open Sky Project was carefully curated so as to integrate animation design and Hong Kong\u2019s environment. The requirements for submissions stated that the design should convey texture and depth on the monochromatic display, and that the artists should consider \u201cthe rhythm of the movement across the screen [since] static images or text aren’t as suitable due to the low display resolution.\u201d[6]<\/a> The project encompassed dozens of works, based on all possible techniques \u2014 from hand-drawn animation, to computer graphics, and to photographed videos. In addition to the aforementioned Fly High \u2014 Time Flies <\/em>and City Paths<\/em>, notable works included animations that address directly the idea of temporal crisis. For example, Dance with Time <\/em>by Zhao Qian and Charlotte Greenblatt, which took part in the 2014 Open Sky Project, depicted an acrobat dangling off a giant clock-balloon. The artists explained: \u201cTime is eternal, and therefore the speed of time is relative. The rhythm of urban people\u2019s life accelerates the speed, flies as fleeting. This is especially true in metropolis like Hong Kong, and even the clouds are in the rapid flow.\u201d[7]<\/a> Whereas Fly High \u2014 Time Flies<\/em>, designed by European artists, simply draws attention to the resonance between the architecture and the animation, Dance with Time <\/em>refers more specifically to Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

The most prominent works addressing the passing of time followed in the footsteps of the Open Sky Project, but were not part of it. First, Art Basel Hong Kong, an annual for-profit art fair, commissioned Cao\u2019s 5-minute-long Same Old, Brand New<\/em>, which showed on March 13\u201317, 2015. Cao Fei integrates into her work the primitive animations of the early arcade and video games Pac-Man, Space Invaders<\/em>, and Tetris. <\/em>In a forthcoming essay in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media<\/em>, I place the ICC animations and Cao Fei\u2019s work in particular in the context of digital urbanism. I note how replicating landmark harbingers of interactive animation offers a media-archeological glossary on the interconnected evolution of the built environment and digital images. Cao Fei deploys the change in size of video games such as Pac-man<\/em> from an arcade game, to a smartphone app, and to a building-size lightshow, to comment on how the city acts as a mediating interface (see the video below).<\/p>\n