During the Moon landing mission of Apollo 17 in 1972, astronaut Jack Schmitt took a breathtaking photograph of the Earth. Through the lens of the camera and with the eyes of the astronaut, the people of the time saw a sphere floating mid-air, its luminous blue color attributed to the large body of water that covers 70% of the planet. Today, when we think of the Earth, the image that appears in our minds is mostly identical to The Blue Marble. The outcome of this space exploration completely overturned previous imaginations of the world and shaped a new worldview for an entire generation: the newly-born concept of the global village has crossed oceans, connected through artificial satellites.
Few realize that the photographing of The Blue Marble requires perfect timing, in which the Sun, Earth, and Moon must be in specific positions. To some extent, this photograph is the fruit of a specific “viewpoint.” The Blue Marble “mixed the known and the new in a visual format that made it comprehensible and beautiful.…” The land and sea in the image appear tranquil and beautiful, without an inkling of disturbance, smoothing over the countless discords and noise between nations and people.
This mismatch between the existing state of incidents and objects and the imagination can be distinctly seen in Chang Chih-Chung’s participating work Sea Unlevel. The work uses “the sea is not level” as a metaphor and questions the perspective of viewing seawater as homogeneously flat. In other words, Chang Chih-Chung focuses on the continuous changes surrounding seas. Either from a scientific or social viewpoint, countless issues and phenomena, such as global warming and rising sea levels, political and economic tensions in territorial seas or international waters between large nations, offshore (relative to the land) fishery, and the vanishing of islands or coastal land, have shaped our current understanding of the “sea.” From the perspective of physical sensations, the sea is not always peaceful and calm but constantly carries turmoil and disturbance, flowing endlessly, carrying or overturning ships or people.
The artist consciously aimed to deconstruct the “sea” from its geographical context, observing that “The bodily sensations that emerge on the deck reveal that the tides have never been level, contradicting the visual perceptions of ‘sea level,’ leading to the discontinuity between sensation and knowledge.” The sea that Chang sees is very different from the tranquility shown in The Blue Marble, but neither is it a distant and pictorial representation of the sea. Chang stands on a ship, facing waters that seem to extend endlessly forward, feeling the flow of trembling water beneath the deck. Besides this personal experience, standing on a shore formed by artificial satellites and data, one can also tell the signals of peace across the sea of data is incapable of covering its hidden currents. This disruption between knowledge and bodily sensations is where the micro and macro meet, and may also respond to the images of “sea level” within the work.
As for the staging of the work, the artist uses the penetrative optical properties of an overhead projector to integrate media streams and information groups from different disciplines to further present an unlevel sea. Walking between the projectors and images, what viewers see are conflicting clips that are related to the sea and information fragments amid technology streaming, as well as segmented memories of human interactions with the sea. The presentation method of Sea Unlevel attempts to break existing perspectives or world views, accentuating unstable cognition states. To some extent, the work also reminds viewers of the monopoly of information. However, from another perspective, for the artist, who has carefully accumulated the memories and fragments, the work series is not a mere emphasis on the alienation of information fragments but instead involves the warmth of human selection. In a way, this is a reminder of the relationship and warmth between humans and the sea behind each fragment or flow of information.