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Huang Shiou-ling
Writers: Sylvia Borda& Annie Cheng
IPING
XD
Alibi

By Huang working with web programmers at the Graduate School since 2001, she gained an in depth knowledge of web programming. Huang's "IPING" was inspired by the concept of IP (internet protocol) and PING (source code) which reflected her own interests in the Internet and communication system models. Huang felt the Internet was similar to her childhood memories where she seemed to be aware of everything even though she never left her home. Her project "Alibi" explores this virtual relation of time, space, and memory. It combines street scenes captured by web cameras from different places around the world, and recreates these in perspective to achieve a newly constructed scene. When the viewer sees people walking in the virtual Paris and New York City, the viewer has an illusion of being present in that time and space. As a car on a Paris bridge drives to another street in Italy, it is only an illusion created by perspective that makes the viewer believe that they exist together in space and time. The web creates an allusion that everything we see online exists in the same space, regardless of the actual distance between them. "IPING" and "Alibi" collapse space and time together. "IPING" presents user with representations of their own constructed identity, while the program "Alibi" is a visual program that alludes that users are in the same visual community from scene to scene while in fact they are not.

Huang Shiou-ling's graduate students also led to the construction of another project, "Hyperlink." This project displayed as an installation piece parodies concepts of the uniform-ness in architectural space. A series of doors are available in this piece which all look the same. When one door is opened, the projector projects the image of this action onto the door in front, thus, this display confronts the viewer's perception of what actions took place in the physical and/or virtual space. Thus time and space in this work merge together to create a visual illusion, almost a dimensional ode to Magritle's working strategy explored in "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."

Huang's work incorporates web and technical language to inform audiences about her own experiences and culture. To her, web art is accessible-it does not require raw materials, nor is there high need to collect and install complicated materials for project delivery. For Huang, the computer is a convenient medium wherein she can afford to invest more time to experiment with.

Huang sees the cyber world as a communicative delivery platform where geography collapses but language resonates. One can access content worldwide, though if one cannot understand the delivering language on the website, communication stops. The internet itself is constructed through visuals and language. It is interesting how Huang plays around with the idea of the signifier and the signified of language. To clarify, sign is composed by the signified and the signifier, and the meaning of the sign is in relation to or in contrast with other signs in a system. According to Huang, pictorial images are part of a global language; an image of apple, or the sign, can signify different content in written language from meaning "apple" in English or "ping guo" in Chinese. She explores these themes in her work "XD". Each image, or sign, in this project has an input value associated with another meaning, thus the signifier does not trigger what it originally signifies. Users who engage with "XD" are left to struggle and learn her syntax or language; thus, this web work illustrates the notions of how communication functions by deconstructions, its core meaning. Huang believes that successful art created in Taiwan will co-opt contemporary values to form its own distinct identity and rules.

As a web artist, Huang Shiou-ling focuses on the relationship of the artist, user, and other viewers through the web platform. Her work is contingent on the technological platform of the Internet but also on the willingness of the viewers to interact with her work.

Huang Shiou-ling's works is expanding to become more immersive and now include video recording, and in the future film as well as drama. A recent project "San-Er, Our Classmate Disappeared" is an experimental horror film. It explores the relationship between film, stage and interactions with the audience in the same way Canadian Janet Cardiff tries to create and works for audiences. For this piece, an image of a door is projected onto a trap door. Since the audiences only see a projection of a door not the existence of a door, it is shocking when actors seemingly walk out from a projected image. The stage crew completed this piece by recording the audience's faces, and through quick on site processing these images into projected images that portrayed the audiences as deceased. At the end of the performance, these projected images are played back to further shock the audience.

Huang's early education and work follow a pattern similar to the decelopment of Taiwanese art. She worked in paint, sketches and collected ideas. (See http://home.komo.com.t2/ anncathy01/). However, after her graduate schooling, some time later her mature works began to explore the relationship between time and space and alternate delivery media like the web. The movement away from pencils paint to new media parallels the emergent awareness and full acceptance of technology based art in Taiwan and so creates another dynamic in the evolving avant garde Taiwanese art movements.

 
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Site: IPING, XD, Alibi
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