Context:Constructing Landscapes / Building Worlds

Project:Late at Tate Britain Online

7pm. Tuesday, 15 December,2020

Artist: Xuan Liu & Tingyi Xu

Balcony, between in and out, high and low, open and close, refers to both the physical location and the symbolic transition. We are standing on the balconies in London, experiencing the ambiguity of online and reality in the post-pandemic era. In the meantime, as outsiders and visitors, we with Asian identities seem to be observing on another, more obscure balcony, through a one-sided mirror of the cultural and language system. We witness the contradictions and the structural polarisation of the modern Western society while remotely peeping on the multiple reflections of historical issues such as colonialism and slave trade, etc.

This audio has a total of 14 chapters, composed of more than 40 audio tracks and nearly 80 voice narrations. This is from the “14-day quarantine” measure widely adopted by countries around the world to control the outbreak. The recordings are all self-sourced, including a previous BLM protest march, horse’s hooves of the mounted police patrolling the London streets, the circling news helicopter above the Trafalgar Square, a tunnel in the British Territory of Gibraltar, and waves beat reef at close range, etc. We deconstructed the balcony from linguistics as an “attached” physical landscape and the “communication” virtual landscape into two directions. The obtained phrases were divided into two groups in Chinese and English. The original logics are deliberately broken up and reorganised in sections based on specific conditions and metaphors. The English part is a voice-over by Apple’s artificial intelligence Siri, and the Mandarin part is vocal recording digitally processed. Combined with the background soundtrack, the joint narration of sound by human and machine mutually disrupts the cognition and reconstructs the soundscape that is so close yet so far for the listener.