Good Old Days | Jinn Wang

Good Old Days Part.1
2023
Digital Video, 05:11

Good Old Days Part.1 is a short experimental film that tells a story about a city with a collective memory of a bygone era and its tangled residents. It’s done through a series of absurd cinematic shots, pixelated spatial transitions, scenario-based sounds, and symbolic graphical repetition.

It plays around moving images and its extended forms, which examines the rebellion of psychic structure against its environment in digital space.

It keeps pace with time and ends when the end is near. By that time, it ought to unveil the collective yearning for an idyllic past that has since passed into memory, while concurrently re-evaluating the criteria of a fulfilling life in an technology-dominated era.

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Psychics & Urbanism, Love & Violence

Incipiently, what excited me were the metaphorical connections between urban living spaces and our mental structure—the angles of walls, the lines of buildings, the spatial relationships of objects—and how silent they were as stages for the potential violence of love. The way each of us perceives one’s topological relation between ourselves and other individuals/objects formed the foundation of our mental architecture.

If we were to imagine the intricate relationships of all things in our cognition as some colossal structure (perhaps infinite, beyond our imagination), the shifts within that structure would appear violent, and the leaps between nodes would seem absurd. We tend to interpret this force that generates structural shifts as love. When it happens, an undercurrent that can destroy life and imply death surges around.

This film signifies this kind of life.

Publics, Intimate, Unknown

The film aims to convey impermanence through environmental storytelling. Hence, the film is segmented into three distinct spaces: mall+school (Publics), home (Intimate), and lab (Unknown). In an urban environment under technological dominance, these spaces are intertwined, exploring how public and communal spaces bridge identities, how private spaces are etched with memories and latent violence, and how the encroachment of technology creates absurdity and disconnection.