Artist Statement

Theme: Pacific Rim. Container Culture: Beijing Container. Venue: South Hall

Drift Bottles is Huang Shi’s reinvention of a lost legacy when medieval sailors communicated by drifting bottles. Today, broadcast media, cell phones, and the Internet and have radically altered our patterns of communication and instantaneous connectivity is simple. Drift Bottles reintroduce the notions of surprise and chance in our daily interactions.

Curator Zhang Ga:
In the Middle Ages, bottles set adrift were one of the few means for sailors to communicate with others on the open seas. Messages sealed in the bottles often carried important information or heartfelt blessings. It would be a great surprise for a medieval sailor to find such a bottle from some unknown location. Mysterious, incidental and expectant, the drift bottle can be seen as a symbol of maritime cross-cultural exchange.
Today, cell phones, the Internet and television are rapidly changing our ways of communicating. Anyone can easily connect with others simply by punching buttons. High technology is a double-edged sword, not only facilitating our daily communication but also eliminating the joy of intimacy and surprise once enjoyed by many.
The installation Drift Bottles is an attempt to reconstruct a different mode of communication and to revive one of humanity’s ancient interactive customs. It symbolizes a hope for out-reach and a gesture for understatement via intimate means of interaction in an increasingly alienated society driven by technology When opening the bottle cap, participant A is asked to speak some words into the empty bottle. The next bottle opener, participant B, will hear A’s words as recorded by the bottle. He
or she will be asked to leave yet another message to the next participant after
a beep. Once heard, the words in the bottle are deleted irrevocably.
In addition to bottles used for recording/playback, the installation also consists of other bottles that will contain messages from various parts of the world. These messages are only readable and cannot be rewritten. Thus, the bottles are also metaphorically embodied as a voice container and culture carrier

• Huang Shi (CN) , born in 1979 in northwest China, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Information Art and Design, Academy of Art and Design of Tsinghua University. His interests lie in science and multimedia design. His work City Music was included in the 2nd Beijing international new-media arts exhibition in 2005.