Another day of depression in Kowloon
2012
Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (2012), video still
"I spent at least one year playing, navigating and observing the popular first-person shooter video game Call of Duty: Black Ops. Like a visual ethnographer in a sort of virtual fieldwork, I collected as much useful data as possible from the game world for reflection and later processing.
Another important aspect of my research particularly involved hacking the original interface of the videogame. Like in many first-person shooters, the gun – an archetypal game element – occupied a central position in the work’s visuality. Since I wanted to concentrate on the virtual landscape of the game, I hacked it so that I could remove the gun from the scene while leaving other visual elements intact, adopting a sort of décollage tactics.
The work is structured in a way that suggests an endless loop devoid of an obvious beginning and end, an evocative metaphor for a post-colonial Hong Kong trapped in its dark cycles of political dismalness. It is my personal response to the current socio-political reality in the city and, at the same time, it is a work about cultural representation and its functioning in contemporary popular media within a global framework."
Ip Yuk-Yiu in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)
Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (2012) | Ip Yuk-Yiu
Video | 14’36”, stereo, color, 16 : 9, loop
Call of Duty: Black Ops | Walkthrough: Level 1 - Part 1
"I spent at least one year playing Call of Duty: Black Ops. Like a visual ethnographer in a sort of virtual fieldwork, I collected as much useful data as possible from the game world for reflection and later processing."
In Clouds (2002) | Cory Arcangel
Artist's reference: In In Clouds (2002), the artist Cory Arcangel erased everything but the clouds on an old Super Mario Brothers video game.
Experimental film and machinima, highlighting Phil Solomon's production, are among Ip Yuk-Yiu's references, as well as game artists, Edo Stern and Cory Arcangel.