Artists: Zheyi Liu / Mengning Tu / Xiaoxiao Cheng / Haolin Ge
2021


See the full video here <
Video length: 3m26s

- ‘THE OTHER IS OVER’ -

The development of the Internet has led to easily accessible and low-cost information in its nature. The high popularity of the Internet has resulted in forming a networked society. The Other is disappearing, and the Same is prevailing. The proliferation of homogenisation is the convergence of media content and our perceptual preferences. The visual senses increasingly dominate our lives. We can spend hours in short-form video applications during breaks. However, the video medium is different in that it continues to fill your eyes with new content even when you do not have time to think about it. Therefore, the visual tension of the content begins to take precedence over overthinking, a situation that Byung-Chul Han calls "meaningless stare". The effect of the disappearance of the Other on information and knowledge, is to make thinking redundant. The Other is negative, and the Same paralyses and degrades one's receptive capacity. The danger of homogenisation lies in self-affirmation. Production and creativity have become extremely easy to reproduce because of the high popularity of the Internet, and reproductions have deprived society of invention. Information differs from knowledge in that the transmission of information through different media leads to incompleteness and the subjectivity of those who transmit it and distorted and homogenised views which lose the illumination of information and the act of thinking. The disappearance of the other renders communication meaningless, mere convergent self-talk. The absence of the other's sight blurs the existence of the self, the sense of self-worth continues to weaken, the narcissist longs to find the other from the self, and self-denial, self-production, and self-destruction arise simultaneously. Selfie addiction is also a consequence of narcissistic self-involvement, which exacerbates the sense of emptiness. Intercourse in the digital age has left people without the eyes and voices of the Other, existing in a transparent world of the self. However, the self is unaware of the implicit control of the neoliberal system. Thus this gradually creates a pathological, alienated narcissistic, empty and depressed self. The rapid transmission of visual information has weakened the brain's ability to think, aligning with Baudrillard's view of the implosion. Debord suggests that the capitalists as a minority invisibly dominate the masses as a majority, and they invisibly control the dominated audience. The result is that virtual speculation overrides reality and dominates the lives of the majority. 1 For this final product, we decided to make a video. We modelled and rendered a heterogeneous heart in C4D and Nomad, controlling its deformation and movement to express the pathological epidemic of homogenisation. The whole film is interspersed with alienated images of two organs, the heart, and the brain, and multiple faces to emphasise the fear of the disappearance of the Other. We made our own recorded narration voice and our own synthesised music. We hope to convey to the viewers that homogenisation and the disappearance of the Other can cause us to start to stop thinking and, perhaps, have robbed us of the ability to think independently.