Director : Huang Hisn-Chien
Length : 30 mins
Bodyless is a surreal VR experience based on the director’s childhood memory during the martial law period in Taiwan in the 1970s. In that era, human qualities were simplified and quantified with only few characteristics recognized and measured by the ruling class.
Although this era has long passed, but the rise of the digital technologies follows the same tendency. Governments started to use new technologies like digital surveillance, big data and artificial intelligence as means to monitor and control people. Powerful world leader uses tweets less than 140 characters to define the direction of his country. Human beings are reduced to a few pixels on the screen and left to the military drone pilot to decide to kill them or not.
In Bodyless, the retrospective martial law governing and ultramodern digital technologies are fused into a dark oppression that conflicts with retrospective folk’s living and beliefs. The audience experiences this VR journey through the eyes of an old man who was a political criminal under a governmental secret experiment. After his death, he becomes a ghost and descends into the underground world.
In Taiwanese folk belief, in every “Ghost Month”, which is the seventh month of the lunar calendar, the hell gate will open and the ghosts can return to the world of living to visit their families. The old man’s ghost makes up his face and ascends back to the surface world. Through his eyes, the folk culture forms a rich spiritual world interwoven with nature. However, a mechanical force starts to deteriorate the spiritual world and eventually reduces human forms and memory into simple geometrical shapes that can be easily processed by the technologies.
