I May Doze for Millions of Years is made by Taiwanese artist Val Lee. The title is taken from her latest film which was premiered alongside Buenos días mujeres and N. Three works comprise the trilogy to outline Lee’s research on contemporary violence in society, following her interest in experimental documentary. 

The history of violence culminates in this merging of victim and perpetrator, of master and slave, of freedom and violence (Topology of Violence, Byung-Chul Han).

Focusing on the sociological investigation of violence and complex political situations, Val Lee explores the psychological state of perpetrators and the theoretical context on the spatial and psychological characteristics of the total institution. The concept is associated with the thesis of the sociologist Erving Goffman, where a great number of individuals are isolated from the wider community for a considerable time, together with leading an enclosed, formally administered life. 

In the film N, the characters V and T met in a hotel room in Manhattan and performed 'action scripts' for an appointed duration. As the first work in the trilogy, it elaborates a social relation experiment based on Lee’s field research of the young prisoner in New York.

Buenos días mujeres depicts two others, M and A, who encounter in different sites around Escandón following action scripts that designate their journey. Confronted with several scenarios, the main characters dwell in the narrative as if on auto-pilot. Devising a wholly cinematic language between auto-cinema and auto-documentary, Lee’s ‘action script’ is designed beforehand but played out in the absence of the director. Buenos días mujeres deals with the theme of gender crime, also referred to as femicide. With a rare poetic take on the subject, the work provides insight into the inner system governed by a pulsating toxic masculine behavior. 

In the new work, I May Doze for Millions of Years, M comes across C and other characters who perform in various fable-like sets that lead their journey to an unknown destination. Staged in the surreal cantina La Faena, the scenes are forged with ‘trance’ and ‘hypnosis’ which serve as metaphors to interpret the unstable collective consciousness while confronting politics with diversified ideologies.  

The exhibition I May Doze for Millions of Years encompasses film, installation, a sound piece made by Marcos Lutyens in collaboration with Val Lee, fragmental writings that sketch the scenes behind the screen, and a reading corner with a selection of books that draws the artist’s research path.

MURMURATION

By Val Lee

I proposed a question in my previous work The Library Tapes – Does our collective consciousness resemble a collective brain? It has its shape, weight, and can float or move about in the sky. Could we substitute parts of it indefinitely, like with a grand shrine, in which every element could be new? If its elements are replaceable like those in grand shrines, is it comparable to the ship of Theseus in the philosophical question? Is it still the same collective consciousness? Is the deity still the original divinity? Would the collective brain be willing to move, as the deities did, to a place that is almost the same? If it moved to a nearly identical place, would that still be moving?

I discovered the works of artist Xavi Bou while researching murmuration. He presents the flight of birds with incredibly mathematical lines, as though capturing the intention of the birds.

Xavi Bou told me he was studying the massive wave-like lines that birds would leave in the winter skies when escaping the pursuit of eagles. He said if I looked closely, I would see that there was an eagle in every photo. He said the lines were like instant sculptures that eagles carved into the sky.

When birds form murmurations, every bird can receive signals from only seven neighboring birds. The information they take in includes a large amount of noise and disturbances, and birds need to constantly adjust their course. Animals are often required to form communal decisions. In animal communities, information about migration routes or food sources is often commanded by only a few individuals. Individuals may prefer different options, but collective decision-making ensures that the flock does not break apart. In their 2003 report, University of Sussex Professors Conradt and Roper proposed that for non-humans, democratic mechanisms are more beneficial than despotic ones. This is not because the opinions of every swan or cricket are respected or heard, but rather that democratic mechanisms tend to produce less extreme situations. Animals, too, exhibit voting behavior: Red deer express their wish by standing up. African elephants indicate their stance by giving low-frequency grumbles; the group adopts the majority decision of adult females. Swans communicate with head movements; once the intensity of signals reaches a certain threshold, the entire flock instantly takes flight in synchrony. African buffalos cast votes using their direction of gaze. Honeybees express their opinion through dancing and conclude by integration of signal strength and frequency.

Movement is crucial for animals. Movement is not the conclusion, but if we imagine the conclusion to be a massive, unfathomable entity, the means of movement determines the perspective from which we delve into the endgame.