They’ve got something to tell (share with) me… Did I hear them?

I wrote them back:

Kingson Chan 陳健聲 (104):

Beatrice Wong 黃雪綾 (102): Goodbye Note to Self 2019 《2019年，給自己的告別通知》

Chang Chih-chung 張致中 (118): Fabricating Mandarin Duck 《作鴛鴦》

Yu Shuk-pui 余淑培 (109): Vase Piece「我的志願是作一個花瓶。」

Joshua McGregor (127): Opera of the Kettle

New Materialism,Agency,Things,Subject-Object Relation,Anthropocentrism

The work is about things – especially those that we encounter in everyday life.
\nWhat happens when the kettle is left alone?
\nWater changes states, becomes a gas, bubbles, flows around, the kettle becomes hot, electricity flows: a network of things interact here while no human being is required.
\nThe overdramatization of this process – which we would usually disregard as quite simple – thus challenges our anthropocentric point of view and attempts to tell a story in which the thing is the main character, gets a stage, is involved in drama – roles usually given to the human in moving images. It is a call to change the way we see things themselves. Things are not only objects in relation to human subjects, but they have the power to change things, to change themselves, they have qualities, they have the capacity to be a cause or an effect, they are political.
\nEspecially in our modern age of technology, we need to take objects into account in an attempt to understand our life and shift our view from the object related to the human subject to an interconnected network of things and actants.
\nThe video work consist of the kettle filmed from multiple angles. During the process of making the video, the camera was simply placed around or on the kettle and left alone with it: the stage belongs purely to the thing.