A Haunting Glimpse of Anonymous Humanity

Painting on negatives by Nick Gentry

What I love about the internet is that it is truly becoming the Earth's nervous system, a high speed causeway for information. Every photograph, film, voice, song, email, text, pdf, recipe, and memory, potentially causing a reaction in parts unknown, to people unknown. Every electron moving us closer to a sensate planet that has the ability to watch and consider itself as a whole. 

That's what this piece, Directed by Lei Lei, and Thomas Sauvin is. It collates more than 3000 found images into a collage that speaks, to me, of both the beauty and futility of humanity. It gives me unique glimpse into who and what we are, the remarkable similarities that we so exhaustively try to deny. 

Artist Lei Lei's describes the work as, "a dizzying, eerie animation. The effect is both a flip-book glimpse at three decades of Beijing's history, and an uneasy, voyeuristic peak into the private lives of thousands of people - or, as the artist describes it, 'an almost epic portrait almost epic portrait of anonymous humanity.'"

I find the film haunting —so many faces, so many stories reaching out from a recycling plant in Beijing.

Recycled from RAY on Vimeo.