GMU:Breaking the Timeline/projects/Mutually Intelligible

Title: Nicht blind, mute und deaf

Background

1. I remember the first few meetings and classes when I got here last semester, they were all in German. And without any knowledge in the German language, it sounded like noises to me and I started making up the content when they talked. The initial idea that I came up was to film some of the lectures and edit subtiles on the images, which would be totally unrelated to the acutal content that they were discussing.
2. I have been attending lectures and workshops that are held almost entirely in German. To me, sitting in a classroom for more than 6 hours and listening to something not comprehensible at all is kind of a torture. Similarily, I am also interested to find out how would a person feels when he/she is forced to listen to something not in his/her first language.
3. The expereince of watching movies here in Germany is pretty hard because most of the movies, they are synchronised with German language instead of screening the original audio version.

Concept

1. Select a (or some) German movies and extract some of the scenes and/or shots without the audio
2. Select a collection of foreign movies and extract the audio (dialogue) from some of the scenes and/or shots
3. Synchronise the extracted images and audio and export it as a short video
4. Create a booth that contains monitor and keyboard buttons that one can select languages (no German available) for viewing the video.

(I do not know the technical parts to build a booth with sensory buttons...)

Background

The result of the trial of the previous idea was not satisfactory, so I decided to take the idea further to an indirect and non-interactive approach to the project, by setting up three screens to show how I spent my days randomly in weimar, suggesting the feeling of allienation, losing in time and space.

Concept

Replacing dialogues from my previous experience which is familiar to me (language-wise) to the present expereince I have in weimar which is not comprehensible. It is how I usually make sense of something I cannot understand. Sometimes in real life, the images can be a separate track for comprehensing experience, by imagining an audio that I understand, I can therefore make sense out of the things I see, though it can be totally unrelated to the actual happenings.

Presentation and content

The 3-screen installation shows two particular things I did on two random days and one of the screens shows a collage of the people i met in weimar.

1. Screen - The screens
   
   
   A collage of the footages of a worldcup game (Germany vs Ghana) that I was watching, including livestream, TV, youtube highlights, fifa (playstation), while the audio was taken from the same match on the same day and time on a TV channel in Macau that i used to watch football games, and the language is in portuguese.
   
2. Screen - The park
   
   
   It shows what i saw on a random day at the park - some German boys were chatting and chilling out. as a foriegner in this context, I wish I would understand what they were talking, so I tried to recall some movies I have seen, looking for a memorable dialogue that I have come across, so that the images I was looking at became meaningful.
   
3. Screen - The girlfriends
   
   
   A collage of distorted close ups of the girls I met in weimar, who I spent most of my time with. None of us know each other‘s first language, but we communicate well with our imperfect english. Still, music is the best common language, to express our emotions, to show passion to one another. It also shows my view on how a person perceives vibes; from a normal pace and tone before processing to a slow motion, altered pitch chanting while the mind processes a melodic expression.