Two Portraits

#1
David Rokeby’s Giver of Names, the preliminary version(1997)
(The image above is the current version of Giver of Names)

Giver of Names is an interactive installation which translates the computer vision of the objects into the spoken language by analyzing the various aspects of visual information of the objects and inducing the implied words and ideas. This current version works as the exploration about how to perceive the still life.

The first preliminary version of Giver of Names only involves in verbal aspect. In the first version, all the written languages David Rokeby produced by the time was processed in the computer. The pattern of his language usage forms the landscape of piles of languages. And the new sentences are generated out of the piles of languages, which can be conceived as the possibility of what he might have written or what he is likely to write in the future. This often absurdly generated language is the portraiture of self-identity with the possibility of occurrence in the past and the future. It raises the question of hypothetical and parallel representation of an identity, shifting the traditional concept of portrait as depicting the past moment of actual occurrence to a richer, more ambiguous and alternative dimension of the portrait creation and appreciation.

#2
Christian Boltanski’s Reflexion(2000)

Many of Christian Boltanski’s works deal with the concept of memory and identity. When the audience enters the gallery, the projected portraits of anonymous evokes the sense of mystery and alien identity about unknown people. The only thing the audience can confirm is that the represented people must have had the specific moment in their life. The appearing and disappearing self images reflected on the mirrors on the wall juxtaposes the past mystery of anonymous’ memory with the image of self wandering in the present. Ironically, once overwhelming evocation of identities soaks into the realistic photographic imageries losing the sense of identity and memory in its anonymity.