再会,通州
宋晓霞
中央美术学院人文学院教授,著名艺术理论家、批评家
这里不是普通的纪实风格摄影,而是一座转型城镇的视觉档案。
这里不只是前沿科技图像系统,而且是一段正在消逝的城镇生活,一群鲜活而有魅力的人。
这里也不是时间的记录,而是在空间中发掘时间的文化内涵。
摄影不再只是一个影像记录的过程,而是转向寻找过去-现在-未来的时空交汇,呈现出今天现实世界里互动着的空间关系,并且和观者共同认识和思考这一关系的意义。当代艺术的思想方法、中国文化的历史意识与西方的空间观念,共同构成了“通州视觉记忆”的思想资源。
从影像的物理空间,到社会空间和历史空间,以可见、可摄、可采集来呈现“不可呈现”的社区文化和人情味儿,这是由物境向情境的探索。从现实回溯往 昔,从未来审度现在,摄影因此穿透了客观表象而转向了主观的社会空间。
当艺术家把成像、声音和文本系统带入交互环境,特别有利于运用超媒体,关注完全的感受,尽管是以数字的方式的造境。这样一种艺术的方式,既是一种思维模式和行为的探索,也是面向未来的文化建构。
通州的公共文化建立在社会的微观层次上,它由通州的街道、厂房、商店、居民区、清真寺、公园、村庄、樱桃林、院落里的日常生活的社会交往所产生。“通州视觉记忆”项目在社会的微观处建立了2766个采集点,拍摄20000余张照片(共计4500GB),拍摄视频超过300分钟。随着城镇和社会越来越强调视觉化,这些图像资源不仅将作为通州意象和记忆的来源,也会作为北京城市副中心文化建构的一个来源。
当代视觉媒体的发展,使得影像成为组织城镇空间最重要的文化手段。城镇的视觉形象,从早期的地图到有老城照片的明信片,不仅仅真实地反映了历史上的城镇空间,而且经过想象对一座城镇的纪念碑性质进行了重组。文化能为一个城镇提供基本的信息,包括象征、模式与意义。作为一个产生象征的系统,文化促进了城镇发展的连贯性与一致性,城镇的视觉再现“推销”了城镇的发展,也有助于形成新的集体认同。
由中央美术学院王川教授主持的“通州视觉记忆——大型影像采集及数据管理应用平台项目”,采用了全因素采集技术和云端集群服务器等一系列图像科技成果,“旨在建立集数字图像信息采集加工和视觉资产管理于一身,涵盖城市视觉档案、公共教育资源、成果可直接服务于未来城市建设和乡村改造的“视觉资产”管理应用云平台。”
英国媒体艺术先锋罗伊 阿斯科特1990年代曾说,“新的文化和科学隐喻与典范正在形成,现实的新模型和表现形式正在创造中,新的表达手段正在出现。”(《远程拥抱中有爱吗?》)“通州视觉记忆”既有经全景球幕数据采集设备合成的球幕图像,可以支持VR虚拟交互漫游演示;同时又保留了摄影媒介的独特语言,从认知、观看、思维、审美、叙事、意识形态、传播沟通、社会行为等方面挖掘了摄影的表现潜力。“通州视觉记忆”采用了两条并行的拍摄路线,一是拓展了人类视觉经验的全因素采集,二是保留了人的体温与互动对话的传统摄影。由于它在新技术的“科技感”与传统摄影的“温度感”之间保持了平衡,因此你能感觉到一种综合艺术的出现。
通州正在从北京东郊蜕变为北京城市副中心的历史时刻,“通州视觉记忆”里的人与生活我们都不陌生,因为我们每天都身处同一个再建与重生的循环之中。历史就在我们身边,历史就是我们。
向过去看的越远,是不是就会向未来看得越清楚?“再会,通州”,是我们向着通往未来的空谷投去的一声“足音”。
It is no ordinary documentary photography, but a visual archive of a city in progress.
More than an image system boasting cutting-edge technologies, it carries the urban lives and the lively and charming fading to oblivion.
Neither is it a record of time, but a spatial exploration of the cultural meanings of time.
At this point, photography expands beyond a simple process of documenting with images; it proceeds to seek temporal and spatial intersections of the past, the present and the yet-to-come. It presents the relations of spaces interacting in the authentic world; and it invites the audience to collectively perceive and contemplate the meaning of these relations. The ideological methods of contemporary art, the consciousness of historicity in Chinese culture, and the western ideas of space, have altogether served as philosophical resources for the “Visual Memory of Tongzhou”.
From the physical spaces of images to social and historical spaces of them, this presentation – by the visible, capturable and collectable – of the “unpresentable” community culture and human sentiment renders a shift from navigating through the realm of objects to that of senses. By tracing the past from the present, by inspecting the present from the future, photography transcends objective representation to aims at the subjective social spaces.
Bringing the systems of image, sound and text into an interactive situation is particularly favorable for artists to their adoption of hypermedia and attention to feelings in its entirely – though by means of digitization. An artistic practice as such is not only an investigation of the patterns of thinking and acting, but formulation of cultures for the future.
The public culture of Tongzhou bases itself on the micro-level of social life; it is generated by day-to-day living and social contacts staged in the region’s streets, factories, stores, residential areas, the mosque, parks, villages, cherry orchards and courtyards. From these micro spaces, the “Visual Memory of Tongzhou” project has put up 2,766 capture spots, taken some 20,000 pictures (adding up to 4,500GB) and filmed over 300 minutes of video clips. As visualization is gaining increasing emphasis from the society, these documentations will become not only the carriers of Tongzhou imagery and memory, but the source which Beijing’s subcenter builds its culture from.
The development of contemporary visual media has rendered image the most important cultural measure of organizing urban spaces. The urban visual images, ranging from old maps to posters with pictures of the old city, have not only mirrored the once-existing urban spaces, but reconstructed the city’s monumentality via imagination. Culture provides the basic information of a city, including its symbols, models and meanings. As a representation-generating system, culture advances the coherency and consistency of urban development, and the visual representation of city “markets” the city’s development while also driving the formation of a new collective recognition.
Presided over by Prof. Wang Chuan from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the “Visual Memory of Tongzhou, An Image Capture, Data Management and Application Platform” project adopts trailblazing image technologies such as full-factor capturing and cloud cluster servers with the aim to “put up an administrative and applicative cloud-platform that integrates collection, processing and management of digital data and visual assets, covers urban visual archives and public educational resources, and generates outcomes that can be applied directly to future urban construction and rural renovation.”
As the British avantgarde media artist Roy Ascott put in the 90s, “new cultural and scientific metaphors and paradigms are being generated, new models and representations of reality are being invented, new expressive means are being manufactured.” (Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?). Equipped with panoramic full-dome data capture devices on the one hand, and preserving the unique media language of photography on the other, the “Visual Memory of Tongzhou” project is able to both present VR interactive roaming through full-dome images and exploit the potential of photography for expression in perception, viewing, thinking, aesthetics, narrative, ideology, communication and social behavior. The shooting process of the project advocates two parallel philosophies: the expansion of human visual experience through full-factor capture technique, and the preservation of warmth in humanity as well as interactive conversation characteristic in traditional photography. By virtue of balancing the “sense of technology” in new techniques and the “sense of human” in traditional photography, one may smell the emergence of a comprehensive art.
At its history-marking point of time, Tongzhou is embracing a transformation from an eastern Beijing suburb area to the city’s subcenter; yet, people – and their life – documented and presented in the “Visual Memory of Tongzhou” project are still of familiarity, for we’re engaged in the same loop of reconstruction and rebirth every day. History is just next to us, or, history is us.
But does looking back more deeply in history have to indicate looking more clearly to the future? In front of the spaciousness of the unknown, “Tongzhou, Farewell” may be a long-awaited greeting we cast to tomorrow.
SONG Xiaoxia
Professor, School of Humanities, CAFA
Translation by XU Xiaoliang