Revenge Scenes

Revenge Scenes by artists Su Hui-Yu and Cheng Hsien-Yu can be considered as a live art and installation work developed from Su’s earlier work, The Women’s Revenge. The work utilizes live streaming, augmented reality, and machine learning among other techniques, to lead the audience back into the history of social realism films and (female) exploitation films in the 1980s, where it highlights the ambiguous similarities between social media culture and exploitation films through the juxtaposition of the two. The work depicts the contemporary media society’s portrayal of the body and further questions the issue of body politics under new media technology. Revenge Scenes features live performances with augmented reality elements. Through the audience’s assistance in broadcasting, the images are shared on social media platforms and other locations where the videos are redeployed in real-time. As a performance, Revenge Scenes features four levels: human performance, augmented reality experience, real-time broadcasting, and redeployment of broadcast images. These are in an ascending structure, the first level is the purest and simplest, and the last level is the most elaborate and convoluted. Through the four levels (viewing conditions), no one can claim to have the best viewing position, effect, timing, and interpretation perspective, but they will have a limited degree of freedom to alter and combine, where they will be able to collaborate with others to a certain extent. In its passive exhibition form, Revenge Scenes is transformed into the form of a crime scene instead of its performance version, where it continuously raises various questions about our history and future, such as:

How long or how heavily have humans desired or depended on contents being “live”?

Since the dawn of imaging technology, how have “messages” collaborated (or challenged) with reality?

What is the current state of “mediatization” of our bodies? How else can we train our bodies?

Search engines altered the act of memorizing, so follows, how can the mechanism of machine learning and algorithms alter judgment and cognition?

Under the assistance and influence of contemporary technology, can we further ease the tension and predicament in issues as gender, sex, and physical body (even soul)?

Or, we who have been expanded but also compressed in the fantasy/environment created by new technologies, do we withdraw to a certain human/barbaric naturalistic state?

Following on the reasoning above, if we further question our body, after this transitional process involving body/signal, linear/non-linear, analog/codes, and followed by the targeted placement and manipulation at the end of the process; where will this finally lead us (and our desires) to? Can a future “technique of desire” be expected? Can this be a calculated spiritual transcendence, or become yet another self-surveillance, exposure, and betrayal of The Transparency Society?

Regardless of the answers to the questions above, as a new form of experience, Revenge Scenes intends to lead the audience as best as possible to all possibilities.