D-Normal/V-Essay, online video zine, issues 1-4 (2020-2022)
Portrait | Credits: Floating Projects Collective
Portrait | Credits: Floating Projects Collective
D-Normal/V-Essay: cover image, issue #1 | Credits: Floating Projects Collective, design by Jess Lau
D-Normal/V-Essay: cover image, issue #2 | Credits: Floating Projects Collective, design by Jess Lau
D-Normal/V-Essay: cover image, issue #3 | Credits: Floating Projects Collective, design by Jess Lau
D-Normal/V-Essay: cover image, issue #4 | Credits: Floating Projects Collective, design by Jess Lau
To continuous, intensifying social distancing and crowd restriction measure, D-Normal/V-Essay (DnVe) proposed a sustainable "digital normal" through virtual togetherness, re-inventing the video essay to express our existential conditions, and a joint platform gathering artists and non-artists.
Multiple calls gathered over 200 worldwide submissions. Subsequently, 90 videos were published in four online editions (Dec`20, Mar`21, Jun`21, Apr`22), each with themes emerging from the round’s works. DnVe responds to the narrowing range of free speech in HK and the pandemic’s impact around the world. Riding the ease of virtual transportability, we revert the grand-issue editorial approach to self-articulation.
What did they want to express? A Turkish immigrant in Germany, the gender-based architectural structure of an Iranian house, sentiments for HK, where to "glean" Taiwan’s slighted histories of, virtual presence, performing digital beings for the camera, inter-species thinking, quarantine, two full years of online schooling…
All staff members are members and friends of the Floating Projects Collective, who contributed to the online zine outside their full-time work.
General Editor/Project Initiator/Grant recipient: Dr. Linda C.H. Lai
Digital platform maintenance and on-line editing: Chun-hoi Wong, Hugo Yeung, John Chow, Winnie Yan, Jess Lau (graphic design)
Extended educational workshop coordinators: Andy Li, Kel Lok
Jury: Fei-pang Wong, Dr. Hector Rodriguez, Prof. Tamas Waliczky and the entire editorial team
Digital platform development: XCEPT (an IT company formed by young HK artists)
The project is supported by a one-off initiative of the Hong Kong Jockey Club administered by the Hong Kong Arts Development - awarded to Linda Lai through a competitive open call, to be executed by the Floating Projects Collective.
Floating Projects (2015- ), participatory art experiments by the Floating Projects Collective initiated by artist scholar Linda Lai, ask how artists cope with institutional and physical constraints, and survive beyond the gallery system or a public funds-dependent charity model. Members share rent for a re-purposed industrial unit and maximize accumulated resources for sharing.
Linda Chiu-han Lai, Associate Professor (intermedia arts, Critical Theory) at the School of Creative Media (CityU HK), is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on historiographic experiments. She was Hong Kong’s “Artist of the Year 2017 – Media Art.“ With video manifestos 1-2 (2018, 2021), she gathered over 100 videographers.