Rewired rearview mirror with video stream recording in loop, 2022.
“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future,” Marshall McLuhan once observed. “People never want to live in the present. People live in the rearview mirror because it’s safer… they’ve been there before, they feel comfortable.” “Antipodes” (2022) is a video sculpture work, rewiring a rearview mirror suspended from the ceiling. Sia’s work reprograms the rearview mirror to play an appropriated live-stream video recording by the Taiwanese Taoyuan tourism bureau, a constant 24-7 live-broadcast of a mountain vista and sweeps periodically to a popular scenic destination, the Xiao Wulai Waterfall. While the particles that make up a waterfall are ever-changing, its shape and image is constant. As it swells in the summer months, or slows between periods of rain. Baudrillard describes the vistas around waterfalls, such as Iguazu in Argentina, as “catwalks leading” to the waterfall “like cinematic arms,” or “optical tentacles approaching the liquid chaos.” Viewing the waterfall requires ascending or descending around its natural features, mirrored by the poetic gesture of the live-stream as the robotic camera’s gaze moves sporadically from waterfall to mountain. Oriented towards the gallery window, the viewer may observe a glint of reflection from the mirror as they do the changing light from outside. The video recording is for a duration of 1 hour, showing the robotic camera’s gaze panning and zooming sporadically from a waterfall scene to a mountain view. Originally presented in a solo show “Minor Landscapes” at FELIX GAUDLITZ in Vienna in 2022, the work is the first of a series that invites reflection on the tension between the sublime and contested landscape staged in the Pacific Rim.