Searching for his personal identity, Wu Jun Han Self Studies through both digital and analogue worlds that he inhabits. As time morphs across both universes, Jun Han’s films offer us moments to revel at the fluidity of identity as we weave through temporal subjectivity.

Intrigued by the currently all-pervasive Artificial Intelligence (AI) that he frequently interacts with, Jun Han was keen to understand machine learning in the early stages of this project. After all, humans and AI share an interdependent relationship. How can tweaking algorithms morph the way we understand a sound or an image? Concurrently, as an artist he also wanted to challenge himself out of his comfort zone. He was cautiously willing to pen stream of consciousness as fodder for a potential performance text. Through discussions and dramaturgical (re)framing over six weeks, Jun Han conscientiously employed two different strategies that had significantly shaped each of the film aesthetics.

Jun Han dissected his search for the personal identity into the broad strokes of “digital” and “analogue” with each echoing reference from popular culture that attracted Jun Han. In one film, precedence is given to the visual aesthetics where he digitally treats photographs from his growing up years. Almost taking a glimpse into an uncertain warped timeline into the future, Jun Han’s intent of “learning how the machine learns to identify me” allows for multiple Frankenstein-inspired strange-yet-familiar images of a bleak disintegrated self – stylistic of his visual arts background.

In the other film, the aural scape becomes the way in which he teases time and identity. Almost as a proxy for the nostalgic tactility of the handheld video camera, Jun Han only used archive footage from his previous travels. Although the visual aesthetics remains fairly consistent, the interspersed photographs again warp the timeline in a bid to relocate (or not) the temporal dimension of the self. The frame of the spoken text itself, drew from a range of inspirations including Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine and Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a Room. In doing so, the aural scape sits as an analogue for Jun Han’s exterior worldviews.