Shaolin Don’t Stop: Face Q-Editor
Country: UK, London
Duration: 1’01
Type: Video
Material: Colour 16mm film, Face, Face-sensing intervention tool
Date of Creation: March, 2024
Shaolin Don't Stop: Face Q-Editor is the outcome of collaborating with a London Shaolin martial artist.
Traditional Shaolin martial training is about uniformity and repetition, focusing on body movements while the face gets overlooked. This de-facing hints that the collective is above the individual. When martial movements are deconstructed into symbols, by using Q-Editor, can we bring back the individual's presence in this 'being watched' experience?
Q-Editor is a face-sensing intervention tool for automatic shooting, which will triggers the on/off of the 16mm camera when it detects a martial artist’s face. These situations autonomously deconstruct martial movements into unrepeatable and disjointed moments, automatically arranged in one-minute lengths of 16mm film.
©胡迪迪 Didi Hu
Quasi-Editor is a key intervention tool in the experimental installation-based video works of the Shaolin Don’t Stop series (two video pieces) and Sign Editor. (I view Quasi-Editor as an intervention tool, not an artwork itself)
It is an intervention tool that can intervene in a 16mm film camera on/off by sensing human face and colour. Recycling from facial recognition machines.
Based on New Materialism, I use it to create installation-based videos that exist between definition and non-definition and are the result of all relationships. By strategically intervening with the 16mm film camera, I aim to blur the identities of the director, cinematographer, editor, and performer, exploring the pure relationship of movement-image and colour-image hidden in the organic combination of human and machine.