Super(im)position: enduring (non-place)

Video medium manifests a ghostly ‘()’, the (non-place); it channels the otherness of an event in space and time, a ritual or paradise.

I filmed this video while testing one of my video experiments ‘Super(im)position’[1] in my apartment. The domestic backdrop and duality of virtual/actual space in this work echo the current interrelationship between time, space and ourselves in an uncanny way.   The screen enacts an ambiguous veil between our embodied presence and the presence of video-mediated space and time, offering distance and intimacy. Video medium captures and encapsulates a (virtual) space and time in which the event we observe was (actually) taking in place. It demarcates a (non-place) where nobody is present, yet everybody is given presence.

Enduring[2] the (non-place)ness of space and time, the paradise is yet to come.

[1] Super(im)position denotes an editing method I have developed for digital video and moving images. It is a rapid intercutting that is generated by deliberate ‘gaps’ on the timelines of two (or multiple) video tracks resulting in an optical illusion as if the two (or multiple) tracks of video imagery coexist in a superimposition.

[2] ‘Enduring’ means long-lasting, existing over time.

Youjia Lu is a Melbourne-based artist who is currently undertaking her PhD at VCA University of Melbourne. Lu’s current research explores how to evoke an immediate experience of an indeterminate Self through digital video art practice. Her ongoing artistic experiments test video’s capacity to digitally manipulate time, create illusory superimposed images and induce strobe effect in projection space. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theories of what precedes the formation of the ego and metaphysical conceptions of time and consciousness, Lu examines different artistic strategies for imaging the indeterminate condition of the Self.

Lu has shown at Columbia University (New York), The Windsor Hotel (Melbourne), Counihan Gallery (Melbourne), George Paton Gallery (Melbourne), Chin Chin Wall of Art (Melbourne), Melbourne Projection Space (Melbourne), Gertrude Street Projection Festival (Melbourne), Testing Ground (Melbourne) and has accomplished her first artist in residency in Picture Berlin (Berlin) in 2015. She has been the finalist of Windsor Prize (2014), Contemporary Art Awards (2015) and Keith & Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship (2017), the winner of NGV Women’s Association Graduate Encouragement Award (2014), John and Mary Kerley International Scholarship (2015), Fiona Myer Award (2016) and Melbourne Research Scholarship (2017). Her artistic research has been recently presented in Visual Science of Art Conference 2018 at Trieste University in Italy and Digital Cultures: Knowledge/Culture/Technology Conference 2018 at Leuphana University in Germany.