Su Yu Hsin
Future Tense: Microcinema Screening
The Andy Warhol Museum
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania
Mar 24, 2022

Su Yu Hsin’s video Tidal Variations will be screened as part of Future Tense: Microcinema Screening at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, the work was made in collaboration with Angela Goh.

“We are living in a time of crisis. Anxieties about the future and questions concerning the sustainability of the planet and its inhabitants have never felt more urgent. Future Tense asks how artists approach these and other global uncertainties in relationship to identity, home, and environment. Selected films highlight both the fragility and resilience of human ingenuity in relationship to nature, space, and place. Collectively, the artists included in this program direct themselves towards the future. They look to the past to reclaim lost histories while simultaneously imagining new possible futures. Participating artists: Imani Dennison, Fang Tianyu, Thomas Allen Harris, Pedro Neves Marques, Joan Michel, Su Yu-Hsin, Wang Mowen, and Zheng Yuan.”

Tidal Variations is a video installation initiated by Taiwanese artist and filmmaker SU Yu-Hsin and her collaboration with Australian dancer and choreographer Angela Goh, and co-commissioned by the Sydney Opera House. The artists dig into the history of the site, re-imagining it—as a speculative data center drifting on water where undersea cables converge, and a screen-like surface that reflects water and light. Under COVID-19, the windows became a symbol of enclosure and isolation. People looked out the window to the street, and also encountered one another as digital framed images. The artists examine Glass Walls and the engineering structure of the Sydney Opera House to map the Internet infrastructure and optical fiber network: the data light crosses the bottom of the sea and reaches the path of people’s glass screens. They attempt to think from the perspective of material imagination in a way to approach isolation and intimacy during the epidemic. Undersea cables construct watery conduits from node to node, frame to frame, window to window. It’s a global system that never sleeps, and information behind the black screen continues flowing. Water and light, the two substances that enabled life to evolve in the first place, now enable the contemporary technological entanglement upon which we have come to rely. The tide in people’s bodies is highly connected with the data light behind the screen. Tidal Variations renders and reveals the image, the body, data, and thinking as water and light, reframing the world through a wet mechanics of seeing

Co-curated by Barbara London and Ellen Larson.