Pollution Pulse

Sixue Yang & Danquis Johnson

Sixue Yang

Following the process of Industrialism in the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to the present, there was a conversion of the national economy from agriculture to industrial development that reflected government policy, social forces, and structural alteration of the historical economy. I have seen thousands of farmlands convert to industrial development. The lake I used to play around in my childhood disappeared; people filled the water with concrete, new buildings growing rapidly as grasses after the rain in the spring. The green mountain I used to see every morning disappeared, instead, the view becomes numerous factories hiding behind the dusty air. The city I used to live in, with all the lake, hills, flowers, trees, was covered by a suffocating cold city construction.

I have no space to breathe. While many people feel that change automatically constitutes progress, I am uncertain. Personally, I was impacted by the changes that inclined me to reconsider the nature that was dismantled. For the past two years, we experience a dramatic change in our daily lifestyle. We are no longer be able to travel, instead, during the quarantine, we were trapped in a space facing electronic products to keep our connecting with the world. At this moment, the covid-19 situation pushed us to rethink our relationship with nature and the environment surrounding us.

I wish to film an enigmatic composition with an eccentric electronic scene and abstract landscape within a familiar-looking but different format featured with sound, ink, and water. I explored the materiality in multiple ways by layering grid patterns, clay figurative sculptures, water, ink, and sound to make transparent and opaque forms. I want to make an experience of seeing the video piece like a revelation, without an idea what is coming next: each drop of ink and pulsating of water presents a new surprise. The camera is pulsating at times with the rhythm of the music. Making the dropping ink floating in the water, I intend to offer an appeal depending on one’s perspective, an ambiguous and alarming reading of nature.

Lost in a strange arrangement with highly twisted space between grid, water, and organic ink forms, an audience will experience the unformed chaos of industrial and electronic development under a poetic landscape veil. Here, time and space seem to disappear. All beings and non-beings are hidden in the floating ink and water, completely self-contained; human passions do not matter. However, the film also features a chaotic current under its veil of serene blandness. The work not only points to the essential abstraction of water but also implies the fundamental uncertainty and ambiguity of life during troubled times when the environment in which humans live is chaotic and upended.

By exaggerating differences and breaking the harmony, I want an audience to pay attention to the existence of conflicts between nature and our daily living conditions, the process of digesting environmental trauma. I want to render an unresolved consequence by presenting harmony and discord in one piece.

Danquis Johnson

Nature does not just consist of Earth tones to act as an emblem of the trees. Water does not always appear blue. Sometimes it’s as dark as the night sky. Black is the water; black is the sky. The nuances between the two entities is want I wanted to explore when I created my album “Inigem.” I wanted to feel reborn from the water and transcend into the night sky. The premise of the album was to create an imaginative idea of the element of water and the sky. I wanted to experiment with sounds that came from water and what space may sound like. The sounds are not the sounds that were just recorded on Mars by NASA but they are original sounds I created to give the impression of outer space. I’m not a billionaire and I can not visit outer space. I will leave that to the expert brave astronauts that work so diligently and arduously to make more discoveries that will help save our planet and the environment.

Fusing the sky and water elements allowed me to explore and experiment furthermore throughout the album. “Foetus Geminea” is one of my favorite tracks on the album. Foetus is Latin for fetus and Geminea is Latin for the twinkling. Geminea also translated to the English translation of Gemini. I liked the idea of the different iterations of twinkling fetus, twinkling twins; a wordplay on the name and creation of the album. One twin is born in water and then one in the sky, then they somehow find each other. One can transcend from the water or sky interchangeably. Furthermore, the name Foetus Geminea resonates with the album’s tone and feel because there is an impression of a baptismal rebirth that continues to happen throughout the track. Foetus represents humanity, life, and the beginning of time. We lost that throughout this pandemic. We have not upheld our bargain to take care of the Earth and each other. We need a rebirth. We need to not get back to what we were doing but do much better with climate change and treat people better as humans because we’re all going to be drowning in polluted waters. During the Belgrade Residency Sixue and I decided that our work goes hand in hand and I was so honored that she wanted to work with me. I thought she’d never asked since she did film and needed music and I did the music. “Foetus Geminea” is the first track I played for her after seeing her work and she loved it. It is literally one of my most fluid sounds so I thought it would be a good idea to share it after her presentation. Throughout the editing process, I noticed the black and the overall cinematography of the film was going in and out of focus. To me, it appeared there was a bulge that would push the proximity of a 2-dimensional piece into what could be 3- dimensional piece or an added effect. I thought it was a beautiful unintentional rising and falling climax of the film.

With climate change and the world in shambles, I wanted to remind people of the beautiful parts of the world throughout my time during the residency. Those beautiful parts, especially the water, have become polluted. The pulse and the pollution coined the name “Pollution Pulse.” Collaborating with Sixue has allowed us to come together to bring awareness to our audience; some of whom may be allies in the fight and to those who are damaging the planet to say enough is enough.