2020
Contempoerary Dilemmas: Story About H, Experimental film, 00:11:36
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This experimental film is about No Longer Human* (disqualification of being human) in the age of digitalization. Everything starts from a personal encounter with H, a friend of mine, who has been diagnosed with Visual Agnosia.
According to Dr Eric Ghadiali’s *research:
“Agnosia is a perceptual disorder in which sensation is preserved but the ability to recognize a stimulus or know its meaning is lost. Agnosia means “without knowledge”. Patients with agnosia cannot understand or recognize what they see, hear or feel. Agnosia results from lesions that disconnect and isolate visual, auditory and somatosensory input from higher level processing.“
“Visual agnosia is a deficit in object recognition confined to the visual modality, despite intact elementary visual processes and which is not due to problems in language, memory or intellectual decline. It is the most common and best understood form of agnosia.”
The definitions of “visible” and “invisible” are no longer merely about how light travels from objects toward receptions of our retinas, or any optical phenomena in the realm of physics. It has turned out to be the mechanism of identity recognition, cultural and political hierarchy under the circumstances of prevalent visual hegemony. Nowadays we are exposed to explosive amount of data, therefore our capability to process information and perceive the exterior world has been inadequate individually and collectively. The velocity of Informative circulation in contemporary society has already surpassed the ability of our comprehension. Thus the conscious recognition and acknowledgement has played a significant role as a filter, to determine whether a cause of an event is sufficient to be established.
There is barely difference between the essence of information and noise, but the applied apparatus, which will reversely re-define the essence and nature of the referred object. Not only we can see this phenomena in public media, but also in the democratic system. Public represents the idea of disorganized data with various ideologies. However democracy in the digital age has been distorted into a biased algorithm materializing the basic human rights. Voters have been exploited unconsciously as the database for political purpose, which is fundamentally an act of deprivation of personal value. When a human being has been reduced into images. We have become ghosts composed of noise, scattering and floating in parallel virtual spaces. Along with the flattening of visual experiences, the meaning of existence is meanwhile being compressed and downgraded. We are now dwelling in the world of ostensible equality, however with a built-in filtering mechanism.
This is my approach to reveal the injustice of digital dictatorship through narrative of micro-history. If I consider this experimental film as a prophecy, which reflected directly the struggling of an entire anxious generation, this will be a message to the future as our latest attempt before being swallowed by an accelerating black hole. This stubborn resistance is the only thing I can hold firmly in my hands as a position of rebellion on earth in the 21st century.
*No Longer Human (disqualification of being human)*: A 1948 Japanese novel by Osamu Dazai.
*Dr Eric Ghadiali: Dr Eric Ghadiali is Consultant Clinical Neuropsychologist at The Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
