đi bộ / video walk (2018)

A cross continental video collaboration

đi bộ translates to ‘walk’ in Vietnamese

Đi Bộ Video Walk (2018) was a collaborative work that I made with Anne Forwood. We were working together and the timing of our collaboration meant that I was actually going to be overseas in Vietnam. So, we developed this cross-continental work together while I was travelling through Vietnam and she was in Melbourne.

Short videos of local scenes in Melbourne and Vietnam were filmed on smartphones then swapped through Whatsapp. These videos were then filmed playing on a smartphone device, in a local surrounding scene that correlated to the original films from the other country.  The aim was to develop a kind of augmented reality vision portraying the ease of virtual travel and globalisation.

What had become very clear to me while travelling is the way that the smartphone has become the eyes of the tourist: tourists are no longer using their eyes, they are either looking through the screen, or just taking photos/videos to look at later. The familiar scene in front of any country’s monument, is a sea of people waving their smartphones in the air and barely looking at the monument itself.

This view of the iphone being held up in front of your point of view is an image that has become ingrained in all of us. The brain/eye has learned to naturally expect the image of the surrounding area will appear on the iphone screen.  We wanted to play with the idea of the smart device screen replacing our actual experience of travelling. We combined a range of images that juxtaposed or matched up the environment with the smartphone video.  The result is a dissonance of moving images. The viewer now had to discern that the smartphone screen image and its surroundings were different, and read the visual clues to learn that they were from two different countries, a hard task that confuses your notion of what is real or virtual.

The effect of this was a familiar yet jarring play on the view of the sightseer, the ubiquity of the handheld device within tourism, and the local/global cultural differences and similarities.