The work Ritual of Cathode Ray Tube treated the transmission of electron-optical images from a CRT television to their receivers’ eyes as a cycle of transmigration. The screens in this work were construed as media-like interfaces capable of penetrating space with people’s unquenchable desires and restoring the scenes of news coverage. Haunted by a morbid fascination with media-formed public opinions and the ensuing chaotic spectacles in the democratic society of Taiwan, this work expressed bizarre, cynical and preposterous public opinions and ergo oozed a bewildering charm.
The duration of this work implied a cycle from the outset and the coda of a TV program. It weaved multiple narrative threads from different perspectives and unfolded them synchronously on five channels, making itself a resemblance to SNG live news stream, an allegorical reading of occasionally overlapping scenes along the linear time.
This work not only bristled with the “cryptographic symbols”carried alongby the extended tongues across the stage, but also invoked the metaphor of extended,intelligent tongues to represent a world of desires. Emerging out of the CRT screen were a great quantity of travelling signals of desires, digital pseudo-scanning lines casting doubt on images, regenerative interfaces, elevators made of furred tongues, a conductor raising his tongue-made baton, synchronous yet multi-directional conducting, puppets manipulated by tongues, and collective consciousness under hypnosis.All was primordially disembogued from the lacerated altar of cathode ray tube…
