Coded Horse

2021, audio-visual installation, dimension variable

The horse vectors kept in a black box are like horses resting in a stable: eating, neighing, walking, or shaking their heads and tails. Running is the only exercise they will not do.

Yiri’s Horse Farm—CHANG Chun-Yi Solo Exhibition

One day, I dreamt that I became a human vector.

Circling, rocking, galloping…, in the world of vectors, black steeds flit past a crack, running back and forth in a moment’s time. As if framed within the webpage, the horses in captivity, dependent on and programmed by the instructions and codes, seem to keep a specific digital identity, while following their own internal laws of motion and waiting to return to reality in the everlasting “horse care center”. Composed of a series of works focusing on horses, Yiri’s Horse Farm is mainly inspired by carousel music box, British photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s horse in motion by sequence photography, Taiwan Toy Museum’s collection of wooden horses, and cyberspace images. By the genesis and translation of images and semantics, it is actually a horse farm that coexists online and offline in parallel. The online horse farm demonstrates various dynamic equestrian vectors of SVG* format; the offline one transforms the horses on the internet into different forms—painting, sculpture, sound and video installation. In Carousel, ±1, two halves of the carousel diverge from the shared timeline and the left and right circles go without a common rhythm. The galloping posture of Eadweard Muybridge's Horse depicts the abrupt break in a circling instant. Wooden Horse ceases to rock, endowed with texture and volume of material in the tangible reality. The lonely black horse on the Marquee is still galloping desperately, and the striplight turns to be its eternal race track. In the black box stand a field of Coded Horse[s], eating, neighing, walking or shaking their heads and tails. Galloping is the only exercise they will not do.

* SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, a common graphic format on the internet today. SVG images can be scaled in size without loss of resolution.

Online Horse Farm
chunyichang.com/yirihorsefarm