Super(im)position: an editing method I developed for moving image and digital video which involves a rapid intercutting that is generated by deliberate ‘gaps’ on the timelines of two (or multiple) video tracks resulting in an optical illusion as if the two (or multiple) tracks of video imagery coexist in a superimposition.

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Super(im)position: Eclipsing (I) is derived from my ongoing artistic research exploring the liminal 'gap' between conscious and unconscious states through the video medium perception. Destabilising a conscious perception of video self-portrait, this video experiment artistically manifests an (un)conscious perception and gives rise to an immediate experience of the indeterminate Self through the liminality of conscious/unconscious, actuality/virtuality, unity/fragmentation. I consider my ‘Self’ in this video experiment as a limbo figure - neither a complete subject nor a total object. Hovering between the subject/object liminality, this limbo figure perhaps also mirrors the viewer’s ‘Self’ in the encounter of this video experiment - a dilemma between sustaining subjectivity (the sense of ‘Self’ is reflected upon the perception of a subject/object in the work) and pursuing immediacy (there are neither subject nor object in the experience exceeding the boundary of a sense of ‘Self’. To respond to the theme of this exhibition, I propose that the hypothetical (un)conscious state manifested through this work as a liminal state where the ‘Self’ is seemed to exceed the boundary of human(-centric) consciousness and becomes interpenetrating with other (para-)consciousness of the ‘Animal Nation’.

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Youjia Lu is a Melbourne-based artist and a PhD candidate at University of Melbourne. Lu’s current research explores how to evoke an immediate experience of an indeterminate Self through digital video art practice. Her ongoing artistic experiments test video’s capacity to digitally manipulate time, create illusory superimposed images and induce strobe effect in projection space. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theories of what precedes the formation of the ego and metaphysical conceptions of time and consciousness, Lu examines different artistic strategies for imaging the indeterminate condition of the Self.

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Lu has shown nationally and internationally at venues such as Counihan Gallery (Melbourne), MARS Gallery (Melbourne), George Paton Gallery (Melbourne), Margaret Lawrence Gallery (Melbourne), Gertrude Street Projection Festival (Melbourne), Columbia University (New York) and Yuan Art Museum (Beijing). In 2015, she has accomplished an artist in residency in Berlin. Her PhD research ‘Indeterminate Self’ has been presented at various conferences such as the 6th and the 7th Visual Science of Art Conferences in Italy (2018) and Belgium (2019), Digital Cultures in Germany (2018), European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in Greece (2019). She has awarded the Academic Assistantship Program at Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne in 2019.