DRIFTING - LOGBOOK 1

This video “logbook” compiles visual and performative explorations reflecting my own personal experience of living in seclusion with no loved ones or familial bonds during this pandemic, only contacting people through digital screens and drifting through space and time differently. During this time of abject dependency on telecommunication technologies and social media, many human acquaintances have transformed into “social robots” that can easily put up a digital façade of human empathy.  It makes me feel even more minuscule and neglected than ever before. I feel as though the only bodily connection I have to my family that grounds me from drifting would be a fragment of my past, like handling rice. Rice is the one thing for me that grounds myself somewhat to my sense of family and identity but it certainly falls short of a true filial bond. Through these impulsive explorations of “drifting” in an urban environment, I am pondering on the vague notions of bodied presence in the face of rising technological dependency, while also reconciling that with my own personal difficulties of being involving past traumas that influence the way I think and feel about myself today, typically focusing in on an anthropocentric view of the world that fuels my feelings of lacking a sense of home, family, identity, and purpose. I ask myself, how is our perception and value of space and time altered due to these uncertain living circumstances and simultaneously our own biases and traumas? 

Kev Liang

Kev Liang is an artist currently finishing his BFA in Intermedia and Printmaking at the University of Alberta. He works with his anthropocenic view of the world that amplifies his own feelings of being a minuscule, purposeless modern human, tying it to his own personal traumas.