橡膠球 Rubber Balls

橡膠球 Rubber Balls

三頻道錄像裝置、OLED螢幕、鐵架、天然橡膠布
Three-channel video installation  OLED screens, iron frame, natural rubber sheets. 400 x 225 cm. 3' 35". 2025

本作品由阿姆斯特丹電影博物館提供檔案影片素材作為創作素材

由臺中市立美術館委託創作

This project is supported by the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, which provided archival documentary footage as creative material.

Commissioned by the Taichung  Art Museum

Rubber Balls explores the implications of the rubber exploitation in Indonesia by Dutch colonists through two major levels of interpretation: the first is an analysis of the original footage captured between 1913-1945 by the Dutch colonists in the East Indies, collected at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam; and the second is the tension of modernity, meaning the discrepancy between traditional agriculture and the extractive colonial model. 

Chia-Wei Hsu uses original footage, a colonial-era novel and audio recordings of a traditional Indonesian musician who plays at a rubber farm, merging historical, botanical and sensorial research with AI-generated imagery. The work aims to create a counter-memory document, opposed to traditional archive-making. The three-channel video installation contains three distinct visual lines: the original documentary footage from the museum’s collection; the imagery generated by artificial intelligence; and the way in which the AI thinks within high-dimensional space. 

The artist drew inspiration from Hella S. Haasse's 1948 novel Oeroeg, which talks about the childhood friendship between two boys, one Dutch and one Indonesian, on a rubber plantation in the Dutch East Indies. As they mature, their bond deteriorates due to the racial and political tensions of the era. In Hsu’s reinterpretation, artificial intelligence was employed to inform the narrative action in the novel, blending historical themes with technological perspectives.

《橡膠球》探討荷蘭殖民時期在印尼進行的橡膠產業剝削，藝術家取用阿姆斯特丹國家電影博物館所藏1913至1945年間荷蘭殖民者於東印度群島拍攝的原始影像，透過人工智慧訓練，創造一份有別於傳統檔案建構邏輯的反記憶文件。許家維結合原始影像、殖民時期小說，以及一位在橡膠農場演奏的印尼傳統音樂家錄音，將歷史、植物學與感官研究交織於AI生成影像之中。透過印尼的橡膠布所構成的三頻道錄像裝置，共包含三條視覺線索：博物館典藏的原始紀錄片影像、人工智慧生成荷蘭與印尼孩童的影像，以及AI於高維度空間中的思考路徑。