Yuanji Liu

Waiting for Memory to expire

How can expired images be touched? This project explores expired images in digital communication as affective traces that mediate presence and absence. The images originate from conversations between my family members and me on WeChat, fragments of everyday exchange that circulate, disappear, and persist as residual memory. Many of these images were never opened; after two weeks, they are automatically marked by the system as expired.

The work takes the form of a spatial installation in which a projected image is enclosed within a tiled, darkroom-like container.Images emerge and expire, appear and disappear, arrive and vanish at once. To “touch” the expired image is not to grasp it, but to encounter it through time, repetition, and disappearance.

Expired Image (Video Still)

Video still from a time-based work in which images emerge and expire within a white field. The image appears gradually, as if in development, while simultaneously fading.

22
video performance, ice

When questions like "where?" keep coming up in communication, does the answer itself still matter? In the process of repeated transmission of information, its original intention is gradually diluted. Through images and installations, these transmission processes are visualized into different material forms, reflecting their texture and weight.

Expired Image

Expired Image serves as the source for a performance documented in this work: hands hold water with an image reflected on its surface; as the water continuously slips away, the image gradually disappears along with it.