Lingxiang Wu

Red Millennial Apple

Red Millennial Apple: The Rough and The Smooth Image explores the impact digital space has on our everyday lives and the reasons behind our desire to consume smooth visual content. The aesthetic of the smooth seeks to eradicate any resistance between images and viewers. Within contemporary capitalist production, poor images are no longer blurred due to low resolution; they are smooth from the rational elimination of excess information — looking becomes consuming. If smoothness is post-produced, then this thesis explores the possibility of reversing that process, roughening the communication between the sayable and the visible through post-production, disrupting the algorithmic automation in Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects. Smooth images are progressively roughened to generate collages, objects, rotoscoped video, and stop-motion animation, keeping viewers at a distance but inviting them to linger, contemplating what they see.

“Red Millennial Apple (2019) is an experimental video created with material from clips of thesis projects, documentation of the process, and documentation of the exhibition. Inspired by the writing of Byung-Chul Han and Hito Steyerl, the video focuses on the dynamic between the initially transparent infrastructure in digital space and the smooth poor images. As poor images become rough and indistinguishable, the infrastructure such as the algorithm and the grids reveal itself to us involuntarily. In this contemporary world of hyper-communication, we as inhabitants, consumers, and producers have been lured by this invisible force to fetishize the aesthetic of the smooth. I perform the act of looking so often that I seem to forget how to look beyond what I see.The full version of each project used in this video can be found at www.lingxiangwu.com”