The Law of the Excluded Middle – In Calculation is part of an ongoing project that spans across several reiterations of a single digital video source. This rendition, In Calculation, is intended to be seen solely through the device screen of the viewer. The 60 second digital recording is played through the display of a smartphone housed within the Proxy Gallery.

What you are now seeing in your smartphone, computer or tablet, is not a documentation of an exhibition, but the exhibition itself. It is a digital video playing on a smart phone, placed in a real gallery space, video recorded on another device, and experienced again through a digital screen. It is a “motion picture” with photography, text, video collage and motion. There is video of paper collage, upside-down scrolling typeface in Chinese and English, video “noise” and signifiers of handmade drawing.

Its existence in the Proxy Gallery “elevates” it to the status of an art exhibition, not a social media post. Rather than a lamentation of how technology robs us of connectedness, Sun proposes here a connection that is im-mediate and mediated at the same time. Thus the “information” or visual incident exists in a back-and-forth dialogue of the digital with the analog, back to digital, etc.

​Sun’s series recreates the processes in which information is encoded, recoded, restaged, received and interpreted. The various renditions mimic a dissemination process: how data flows through our countless networks of communication. The contents of the messages are altered and re-enabled each time to inhabit a new digital vessel. The result is a sequence of experiences that question appearance vs. reality, giving equal credence to each.

*The law of excluded middle means that a statement is either true or false. There is no middle ground.