Alex. Hahn :: Electronic Media Artist

Cao Chang Di Road on Nov 2009 I Stood There Waiting

A handheld, mostly defocused video shot at Cao Chang Di Road, a Beijing art district street. Passing vehicles and people trigger the camera pans. Fluctuations in the original ambient soundtrack control the amount of grain. Blur and grain varyingly obscure the details - fuzziness of recollection and forgetting. At the time, it seemed like filming an ordinary place; the estate of artist Ai Weiwei to the right, eventually, two women waiting to be let in. In the wake following the artist's detention, the reconstructed wait is permeated by the tensional atmosphere present in covert or ubiquitous surveillance footage, foreshadowing imminent perpetration in even the seemingly most inconspicuous places.