Halfway

Site-specific, 2016
Jung Hsu, Kailun Zheng

This light/ audio installation set in the half way of a long corridor along the hillside. It’s the main road for students to go up to classes or dorm. Walk closely to the installation, you can hear a bass sound like train whistle. Then the light flash to your eyes, and soon you come up with a memory passing through a tunnel on a train.

This piece shown up in campus for a month, which is a special project for art festival of NCCU. All participants have to chose a landscape in campus to build their own work.

The inspiration came from a video clip I took on a train from Milan to my aunt’s house. The noise of wheels running on the railroad track. And the light randomly blocked by buildings and trees caused the shadow moving on the cabin’s floor and passing by immediately.

The scene have filled me with nostalgia. Cause we’re always on the way from place to place. The travel time is like the gap between home and destination that let us change our mental state and be prepare for the arrival. Even the transportation improvement shorten the travel time. The moving lights and sounds still remind you that travel means away from past to then.

The challenges of it is the weather and electricity facilities. It‘s so humid that we have to coating up the box of host with waterproof paint. And all circuits need to check everyday preventing leakage. The flashing lights are high power LEDs controller by Arduino, and linked to Pure data to synchronize the sound and light.