you
technology has always been present in my
work it's an extension of what we think
what we can do in itself is it's a
fountain for new ideas
my name is Welland we are at my place in
Long Island in Hong Kong I'm an artist
and I am interested in loss of control
abstraction I graduated from an art
school in Portugal and in 2006 I got the
investigation scholarship from a
Portuguese Foundation and I got admitted
in a Master of Fine Arts program in Hong
Kong so I moved here by the end of 2006
it's been five years now even when I was
studying painting like my last two years
of college I was already working with
video and sound but I was mostly using
software and that software somehow
restricted what I wanted to do and when
I came to Hong Kong on one side I
learned how to program and how to make
my own software it gave me all the
access I needed to any kind of digital
data
in this year's greatest project in
Beijing I made this work call it traces
in which I shot the formations in water
butter made by a boat that i catched to
two central so with the original video I
actually I made an algorithm that
creates a three-dimensional virtual
space and by overlapping layers of the
video I create a certain transformation
in the depth perspective and the moment
I thought you CCA I decided to use these
fog machines which is another layer on
the work that somehow caused the
attention not to the to the projection
not to the projector but what's in
between on a separate room I had a
series of five small monitors playing
these very basic geometric animations
which were all generated by the movement
of the same waves what I wanted to show
was what do we do with data that we
gather from video and what actually
happens in the video itself so well in
one room you had something very minimal
very geometrical where there was a very
clear artificiality in the other room
you had something more immersive more
organic which consisted tests on the
original video and the light pins from
the projector
see of mountains is a work that I did
like and consists on I framed the parcel
of the ocean and I tracked the movement
of each wave that was moving in that
parcel of the ocean and I assigned them
to different pitches in that piano
melody it's a huge contrast between
inputs that is the video and output that
is a sound but at the same time there is
conceptually no contrast at all because
the sound is actually the data that was
coming out from the video there is in
the beginning of sea of mountains a
Chinese saying which is basically if we
try to translate it to English I'll loop
that points to infinity which is
probably you know the idea behind all
that and that visual richness that you
can have in such a close up shot of
something
you have endless movement you have
inverse dynamics that that like many
other works that I do resemble something
that was made by computers and not by
Nature
in November I will have my first job
gallery in Hong Kong for which I'm doing
a project where I'm deconstructing a
subway station at Hong Kong subway
station lately I've been interested in
this so called naan places subway
stations airports etc and to prove that
they are actually they are not really
known places but they are some strange
places that are actually a big part of
our culture
they are transitional spaces their space
is full of visual information so for
this show I am preparing the main piece
which is an installation that consists
on the turnstiles on five turnstiles
identical to the ones in the subway
station that will be automated according
to a flow of people in the central
subway station in Hong Kong so they will
move by themselves accordingly we are
during the rush hour another time of the
day and then there will be a series of
pieces which consists on prints
paintings of the information boards that
you have on the subway station but I am
removing all the information so I just
leave the graphical aspect of it in
another part of the exhibition I will
have a video where I shoot the flow of
people getting out from the subway but I
will use that flow to create one single
shape that will change according to that
flow the main idea behind this show was
something that I am moving that I'm more
and more interest at least into into
abstract the urban space and to remove
text and let the space be just readable
through graphical information
experiments on the notation of shapes
was a project that I started in 2010
which consisted on an archive of around
50 different shots of the Hong Kong
cityscape not the most typical shots of
the cityscape but a few locations around
the city where looking up you will get
these abstract shapes which provide the
skyline that through a computer program
is used as the coordinates for sound
what I was trying to do was to create
some kind of musical composition by
depicting the city in this way the work
was presented as a as a single channel
video where these shots were aligned I
did another video of a complementary
video to this project called conductor
where I actually put the camera on a
small cart and I went through the back
alleys of the city and by pointing the
camera up shooting the negative space
between the buildings which is the sky
then I use the same kind of algorithm to
make this path walking from one point to
another of the back alley to make that
generates another kind of sound
when 2008 I made this piece where I went
to the most crowded place in Hong Kong
which is Mong conch in the condom :
peninsula and I went on a Sunday which
is actually the most busy day and I
stayed outside the subway station
waiting for the crowd to come out I was
wearing a pack of like four contact
microphones on both my arms and I said
or I tried to stay still while the crowd
passes through me and I recorded the
score generated by all the people
pushing me around afterwards I used this
score to to create an interference in
the video the documentation of this
performance so I use an optical flow
algorithm to make each each pound each
time someone needs me to distort the
video the work is called
actually through non-action and as the
name says I was trying to to create a
situation where I wouldn't do absolutely
nothing
but I will say on my physical presence
will have an implication it's also a
metaphor for my situation in Hong Kong
me I am here I don't speak the language
I feel a certain distance from the
Chinese Cantonese context of it but my
my physical presence here has some
implications
what is changing in my work is that I
want to bring the experiences that I try
to document into the gallery room into
it into the gallery space not just
transpose them directly but create a
situation where the only thing that
creates a distance between the
experience that people are having and
the actual experience is the
manipulation by the medium that will
emphasize not really the experience that
people are having but the medium and the
technology itself once users say you
have technology to make your life easy
another thing is you say you have
technology to allow you to do things
that you couldn't no technology student
of course yes I am NOT going to be a
hypocrite it makes your life easy but it
would be much better if people focus on
using technology to actually to try to
achieve things that they could never do
it
you