I give a double title to the video I made, the original one is in Chinese like showed in the beginning of the video "Tai, Wei". It is quite complicated to explain what does it mean in chinese and once I do explain it clearly, it loses that sense of meaning I'd like to keep, so I also titled it " Lost in Simulation" in English, which would also translate the idea I embedded in making the video. Besides that, this is an attribute to "Lost in Translation". And this was also inspired by Bill Viola's video "first dream".
The sense of simulation begins in the beginning where I deliberately repeated one part for multiple times, yet everywhere there's a slight differences. I also borrowed the soundtrack and the title from the movie "Lost in Translation", simulating the movie in a way.
Throughout the video, the camera lens acts like human eyes. Whenever the image get blurred it's because the eyes are filled with tears and slowly blinks. So I was hoping this video makes the viewer to look at the part of the city the way I was looking at it when filming. Approaching the end of the video, the sounds of the streets fade away and disappeared because I was dived into my thoughts, so I hope that psychological state could be represented in a digital way, that the mind was filled with nothing but thoughts, and that there was no sounds. In the end one could hear my voice, I am not gonna say a lot about what I was saying, I'd like to keep that.
As for me, the emotions I put in the video are subtle and personal. But I do not want my own experience and perspective to limit the interpretation for other people, therefore I am not unfolding the whole story. The video was completely shot in taipei, taiwan. The interesting story is that Taipei as a city is largely influenced by Japanese culture, especially in terms of pop culture. So the city feels like Tokyo somewhat, that is where I feel like simulation comes into play. In this video, I interrogate the relationship among reality, symbols, and society like Jean Baudrillard did. The two different cultures that I most resemble with and feel related two mingled together, yet it was elusive and undecipherable, it was familiar and strange. I hear the same language (Chinese) but the place was not my home land. In many aspects, this is a drifter's monologue about her feelings towards the uncertainty in the world. While in the movie "Lost in Translation", Charlotte was in a totally unfamiliar place hearing strange language, I was in a different situation, yet I feel how she felt. In journeys of life, sometimes man could not see how to unveil the face of the future, you feel lost, you feel miserable. I was visting some elder friends, whom almost age the same as my grandparents, （and Charlotte was hanging out with Bob all the time in the movie, who is also a lot older than here), so I could not feel any more related.
Let me end this post with two of my favorite quotes from "Lost in Translation".
"Let's never come here again because it will never be as much fun."
"You'll figure that out. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you."
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