HAU’s digital stage
Tianji Yu
Ping Pong
- Film
- Online
Chinese /
With English subtitles /
A game of ping pong becomes a metaphor for closeness and alienation: director Tianji Yu talks to an AI about lost friendships, political rifts and immateriality. Banal dialogue gives rise to a poetic reflection on memory, absence and humans as political beings.
The film opens with the obvious: The problem of the AI’s lack of physicality – it cannot play ping pong with director Tianji Yu. But would it be conceivable for Yu to arrange to play ping pong with a former friend and playmate who now votes for Trump? Do his political otherness and physical absence make this friend as immaterial as the AI? Is this absence insurmountable – both the AI’s and the friend’s?
A ping pong conversation evolves during which the director’s deep memories and honest reflections turn the superficial and banal AI into an actual surrogate partner. A partner that enables a slow rapprochement to the lost friendship and triggers reflections about humans as political beings. Yu visually stimulates us to penetrate to the core of things through the poetically captivating layers of the visual design as we start with documentary footage alienated by a distorting mirror and transition to a moving painting of simple, semi-realistic 3D animations that unfold as if behind a brushstroke filter.
Dates
Current
Notes:
Price: 5 €
Afterwards available at the HAUthek.
Credits
Production: Tianji Yu.
