KINWAH TSANG

As well as the screens being used to screen the work I wanted to consider all of the other ways that I may be able to get across the main points of the significance of the Amen Break. One way to do it would be to somehow screen all of the names of the artists and their songs who had taken inspiration from it and appropriated, used and sampled it. The sheer heft and volume of these would be great to incorporate into the piece. The issue here was that there were a lot of them now over 2400. My piece as a compromise was going to use 1% of these so now 24 but this did lose the scale of the work that the break has influenced and could only give taster.

The sheer scale of trying to incorporate all of these was not lost on me. As text within the piece itself they would be far too fast on screen to drink in and as audio the same thing would happen, let alone the logistics of finding and including all of the songs that had used it. My considerations then moved to would it be possible to somehow include projections within the space that were a sort of animated wallpaper. They would not detract from the main installation piece but accompany it working at a lower level.

It was here and whilst researching ways to do this that I discovered the works of Hong Knog based artist Kinwah Tsang and in particular his Seven Seals. From his own website below are the notes on the concept and ideology behind it.

“The Seven Seals” is an on-going series of seven digital video installations using texts and computer technology to show Tsang’s thoughts on various issues of the day. “The Seven Seals” draws its reference from various sources including the Bible, Judeo-Christian eschatology, existentialism, metaphysics, politics, etc., which all attempt to articulate the complex situation of the world and the dilemmas that people are facing while approaching “the end of the world”.

Animated phases and short sentences appear and move and float, sometimes, like a murmur and sometimes like an admonition that reveals the nature of human beings and the changes of our emotions. The texts remind us of issues like war, terrorism, revolution, death, murder, suicide, self-denial, etc.

Without a clear beginning or end, each installation in the “The Seven Seals” creates different cycles of text on continuous loops that appear to repeat without end; echoing the concept of “eternal recurrence” whereby all the issues and dilemmas of daily existence are seen perpetually recurring for an infinite number of fleeting instances, even though we recognize and are aware of them for a much longer time.

I loved his work both aesthetically, and the dissemination and exhibition of it although I have not seem it in person the scale and audience immersion looks very apparent. The animated words and phrases and the multitude of ways he has used them dissolving, pull focus, tumbling from the ceiling, use of colour and composition all really excited and intrigued me. I especially loved the floor projections which look as if they were mapped and enveloped the space.

For my current piece this would be tricky to do due to time constraints the scale of doing this, focus on the main installation piece and space to house it in. However moving forward I feel a combination of this technique and the installation screen would work well in tandem. The installation to provide the visual and aural elements to explaining the story. This would allow the rest of the space the installation was housed in to communicate typographically in a Kinwah Tsang style the sheer volume of songs and artists that have used the break. This would envelop the audience and provide this information in  a creative and interesting way but not detract from the main installation screen but complement it.