An Exposition about Audio Tapes and My Life.

Exhibition Duration：2006/2/18-2006/3/18
Venue：Chi-Wen Gallery,3/F,No 19, Lane 252,Tun-Hua S. Road Sec. 1,Taipei, Taiwan

ROOM 1:

FAXMUZIK

My hand drawn sketches are transformed into sound signals through a fax machine. The sound of static buzz was recorded on magnetic tape then processed by sound effectors (echo/delay). The final result was then transferred again, this time into an image, via fax machine on heat-sensitive carbon paper.
These long sheets of sound writings were copied on a fax machine with real-time hand-controlled dials alternated by pulling and pushing actions in order to create again the repetitive, prolonged motives. This series was originally created not as art works but fragments of personal letters.(text translated::Esther Lu)
1 / FAXMUZIK1 / Fax paper / 1997
2 / FAXMUZIK3 / Fax paper / 1997
3 / FAXMUZIK6 / Fax paper / 1997
4 / FAXMUZIK7 / Fax paper / 1997

Six Sketches Concerning Sound

1 / Intelligent Techno / pen on paper / 2004
2 / Meditation / pen on paper / 2002
3 / Kara OK!! / pen on paper / 2001
4 / Words Exploding (On the Tongue) / pen on paper / 2001
5 / Explosion (Revolting Flowers) / pen on paper / 2001
6 / Speaker Effect Delay / pen on paper / 2000
7 / Ear explosion / pen on paper / 1999
8 / Micro Music (Fragment) / pen on paper / 1999

ROOM 2:

Four Sound Objects

1 / Object1 / For Night Chanting / 2006

2 / Object2 / Used in Visionary 1 and 2 / Paper, X-ray film, Lamp / 2003


3 / Object3 / Used in Redhouse Action / Music Box, Paper / 2003


4 / Object4 / Endless tape cassette, Paper, Celluloid / 1997

This project is a collaboration between Lin Chi-Wei and Dino. The crashing noise is recorded on a mobius tape that makes infinite one-minute loops. It is impossible to find the starting and ending points.(text:translated:Esther Lu)

Four Video Documentations of “Tape Actions”

1 / REDHOUSE ACTION / Duration: 4m4s / Redhouse Theatre / Taipei / 2004
Redhouse action is an analogue-digital music project where humans replace machines. The audience was invited to read words embroidered on a 150 meters long plastic sausages balloon. The lyric is meaningless, but rhymes taken from classic poetry. In this way, a human delay effect was made. The repetitive reading sounds from the audience create an ever-evolving sound mass. This is “Analogue Music”.

The “Digital” mechanism is triggered by four sets of noise generating instruments distributed to the audience: water tube, aluminum sheets, beans in a can, and velcro. A game show-like host plays the role of a director with four different colored flags to demonstrate the on and off signals of this “16-Bit digital music.” This video documentation shows the audience improvises on the written notations. (text:translated:Esther Lu)

2.NIGHT CHANTING for Taipei International Performance Art Festival / Duration: 2m47s / Taipei Artist Village / 2005
The audience sits in spiral on the floor reading words printed on a long paper belt. The chanting forms an evolving sound mass.(Esther Lu)

3.VISIONARY-1/ Duration: 3m49s / Gu-Ling Theatre / 2005

“I will walk on your head in 10 minutes!!”, the masked man screams while recording himself. Reversed and played then recorded again on a second recorder, this play-recording process repeats itself between two recorders until the original sound decays and eventually transforms into harsh noise. Then the masked man leaves one player play repetitively.

The masked man begins to gyrate his body like seaweed in the ocean, undulating forward and backward with his feet firmly in one place on the floor. He then turns back toward the video projection screen where his own balancing image was projected. It is difficult for the audience to know if it is real-time projection or the masked man imitating his own gestures.

The masked man then takes off his plastic gloves and raises his arms like that of a catholic priest in the pulpit. A stage assistant paints Nazi swastikas on both of his hands. He approaches the audience, shakes hands with them and writes swastikas on the audience in the front row. This icon is transfer into a Buddhist swastika (卍). Screaming sounds from the audience rises higher as the masked man makes his way towards the exit by walking on top of the heads of the seated audience.(text translated:Esther Lu)



4 / VISIONARY-2/ Duration: 4m57s / White Water Theatre / 2005

In a room that reeks of strong herbal smoke, the audience sees a hand from inside a window pressing the play button of a portable cassette player. A recorded junky-like narrator’s sound is heard. Lin Chi-Wei appears in an S&M suit with a mask on his head making strange gyrating movements with raised hands and waving body. The narrator talks about the failure of the previous night’s performance and promises an improved presentation tonight. Light bulb, sound recorder, electric chair is well designed to prevent the tragedy of Auschwitz happen again the narrator tells the audience, he is ready to “impress” the audience and bring them “to the new life”. One by one the audience finds the two bare bronze cables attached on their seat is actually an electric chair design and it is in fact not just a joke. Sopped the waving movements, Lin Chi-Wei takes off the mask then climbs on the ladder to switch on the central power supply which gives 3 electro-shocks to individual seats in the audience in the sudden darkness. Harsh white noise is heard after the final count down. When the lights are turned on again, Lin Chi-Wei appears in a suit and distributes dried plants in small zip-lock bags. (Text translated by Yeh-Wei-Li)

Opening Concert by paticipating Artist D.I.N.O.

Lin Chi-Wei-A Dangerous Display ! An Exposition of Unbelievable Hardcore Noises

Time , the great manifestation of God. We can do nothing but stand in awe and give praise to God’s incredible breadth and diversity regarding the continuum of sound and as it has been harnessed musically as systems of scales. Each scale holds within itself a particular orbit around which the planet of sound revolves. Artists throughout ages and places have worked for this great demonstration using all their talents.

The huge dynamic range of expression confuses us as it always has: Those who believe in ghosts are putting themselves under ghost’s protection. Those who Believe in the pig go to the kingdom of the pig (consider the mystical pig character from the Chinese folk legend “Journey to the West? ,who is respected as the god of Eros). Those who love Maria enjoy the adoration of her majesty, not to mention those who believe in a diversity of machines, computers, politics, drugs, and supermarkets. There are also those non-believers who, no matter how huge the existing diversity of “isms”,faiths and sciences will, each in their own way, find their own destiny and personal relationship to their special form of Gods. The whole of all these diversities exist together like a gigantic Tibetan Tanka. All of the aspects of our human comedy are like scenes separated by mountains and great walls through which we must walk to see the whole. In order to understand this incredible mystery of causes and reasons which are left unexplained by current sciences , we could make the following summary, though it may seem completely incomprehensible: “When you are doing one thing you are making all the other things happen”.

ie: personal cause and effect. To speed up and condense a whole life of a man into a one minute video documentary; to make a collage of all the scenes of his life into an A4 format; collecting all tastes and smells one could experience into a small bottle of perfume, all the sensations of touch into two silver balls rotating on the palm of one hand. Perhaps the awe that we would experience from this would produce a violent conversion which could possibly shock us . Consider all the possible different psycho-time-scales: Those who live for the past, those for today, those who live for the coming year, those who live in the daily challenge of raising their kids, those who live to make the next payments for car and house; each of them create their own life rhythm with a characteristic timing.

Through this research of musical psychoanalysis for the complete scales and systems of time division, there is none of the pain of vainly attempting to predict one’s future choices or response. Just like the experience of us watching an ant, it seems easy for a three dimensional creation to predict the future of a two dimensional existence: we can predict without pain that this ant is approaching a pool of water on the table, which we, ourself, poured. After ten seconds the water will drown the ant and it won’t have chance to survive. We are seen by a higher intelligence in a similar manner.

Sound art can not limit itself to the audible range of sound in the same way that humans cannot cease in their attempt to grasp that which is imperceptible. So much more is passing though us in sound and vibration in the ultra/infra sonic domain and coming into the world of limitless/endless waves. From radio to rainbows, to gama rays, each expression is based on the unbelievable conversion of a multiplicity of waves where time is totally plastic. We vaporize three dimensional sculptures into music so as to decode the languages into deep dances. On a sleepless night in a nameless corner, where all successive explosions are born: we explode our own identities, realities, educations, nationalities and cultures into powders which shine in the night sky, creating a fantastical instant impression on our retinas, only for a second!

Love is hidden, far from anyone’s expectation, here At least, and situated in the most unpredictable place. Actually it is melting right now into the short silence before the next explosion. (Text translated by Chi-Wen Gallery)