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CLOUDS FALLing 

live video installation / HD / color / stereo / real-time / 2016

A creative annex of CLOUDS FALL (2014), CLOUDS FALLing is a virtual camera obscura of an imaginary post-apocalyptical world, a dark mirror of the current state of world affairs and a critical probing of the shifting boundaries between the real and the virtual in our hyper-technologized everyday reality.

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CLOUDS FALLing contains live views of a series of virtual skies, all taken from the video game CALL OF DUTY. Every day during the exhibition period, the artist selects and presents a different sky view from the hacked game via a custom modified Xbox. 

 

The sky view, generated in real-time by the modified game console, is shown on a monitor suspended in a dark exhibition space while at the same time streamed live via a server to the Internet, commanding both a unique physical existence as well as a virtual network omnipresence.  Audience can choose to experience the same sky either by visiting the exhibition or viewing the live video stream online.

 

The real-time sky view rendered by the game console stands in symbolically as a live camera to the virtual landscape, creating a contemporary parallel and dialogue with Yoko Ono’s video work SKY TV (1966). While in Ono’s work, the “sky” is a mediated electronic signal feed through a live video camera referencing a physical world; in CLOUDS FALLing, both the physical sky and its electronic double are superseded by sets of algorithms, imploding both the real and the virtual by means of simulation, further complicating the logic of technologized perception and representation as implicated by Ono’s work.

Special thanks: Jeff LEUNG

keywords: experimental cinema, machinima, media hacking, game art, appropriation, Call of Duty

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