Thinking through the installation裝置創作過程

The elements of my work:

-One or two selected photos with the parallel scenes from the Days of Being Wild. I’m thinking of going for the Phonebooth alone, or along with one between Clock or Pub/Isolated. I want the size of photos to be not big - possibly A5 at the largest?

-Each photo has the sound recording that people can listen to. I’ll edit the sound with some effects or maybe slight layerings. They can be played through headphones, but I got this option for an old wall-hanging phone to be hung up the wall, playing the recordings. I can get a couple of spares from work and my partner can do some cabling(?) work to make it work.

-If I choose to add Pub/Isolated one, I’d like to leave some old design glassed coke on a small table below the works, so that people can open it up to have it during the opening? And we can leave a couple of empty bottles below the photo for the rest of the exhibition. (if that doesn’t harm H&S)

-For the titles - I’ll look into the lines again to pick up some keywords or sentences to be taken as the titles.

Clock

Clock scene from Days of Being Wild and the big clock at Sheffield station.

Yuddy’s line, “At 3pm on April 16th, 1960, we were together for one minute…” sees time not as a neutral measurement but as something much heavier, recorded and irreversible.

Clock to be shot - at the exterior of the station or the townhall. It should look “massive” - this is because I focus on the migrant/visa layer of the clock. For a migrant, time on a foreign land is heavily bureaucratised. We experience time in more intense ways - measuring in visa expiration dates, Home Office processing windows, residency counts, and “qualifying years” for residence permit or citizenship. The public clock becomes a metaphor for institutional surveillance and waiting - a ticking reminder that our stay is quantified and conditionally permitted.

Audio bit: Clock ticking recording (ambient)

Phone Booth

Tide walks his beat at night, regularly passing a red phone booth. He waits for a call from Li-zhen that never comes in. The booth sits isolated on an empty alley, a quiet monument to a missed connection. The lonely phone booth on Washington Rd was taken in a photo late at night. Got a variation of with/without a person inside, and zoom-in shot of the phone.

The telephone booth is a symbol of symmetric communication. It represents the fragile link back home - trying to call family across an awkward 7 or 8 -hour time difference - and the anxious, one-way dynamic of waiting for official news (e.g. an email or letter from visas and immigration). My old Korean friend visited Sheffield for a short period time is inside the glass box, pretending to connect.Or a zoom-in shot could be interpreted as myself, being visible to the host city, but utterly isolated while waiting for a signal from elsewhere.

Audio bit: Phone booth recording (reverbed)

Pub/Isolated

Yuddy’s monologue about the legendary bird born without legs that can only fly, sleep in the wind, and land a single time - when it dies. It represents a life spent permanently in transit, unable to ground itself in a singular place or home. The scene itself is pretty vague and poetic, so I could replace it to the stadium(where Yuddy gets coke from the beginning scene)

Found this “Korean” bbq sauce bottle at a pub I went for the World Cup match. I was surrounded by (obviously) all british wearing England shirt, and standing among my friends in reds and whites felt a bit like that bottle in the corner, not that much “needed” in the scene but somehow be there doing its role.

National sporting events act as intense catalysts for belonging and national identity. Being in a pub during an England match shows the sharp contrast between collective national euphoria and migrant detachment. While everyone around me is unified by a shared heritage or background, not thinking of ease of belonging, I would be reminded of my status as an observer. Like the bird with no legs, I float inside their space, present in the room and terrace, but suspended outside the collective identity.

Audio bit: Worldcup pub sound recording + overlay the sauce squeezing sound? Or is it too tacky.