Duet.
(n. In The Mood for Love, or chao)
Real-time Generative Text Loop
2021
Duet is a real-time cinema with only subtitles on screen. Appropriating a classic scene from Wong Kar Wai's movie In The Mood for Love, the dialogues line from two protagonists, also a couple falling into an adulterous relationship, Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-shen, are split into short fragmental sentences. The dialogue is played randomly in an endless cycle of wordplay, recombining and deconstructing the original plot of the story.
Through the use of custom software, the dialogue between Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-shen is presented in a real-time and non-repetitive order, after being disturbed by a random algorithm, which results in different dialogues every time. Forming narratives that are absurd, senseless while at times suggestive and ambiguous, it supposed to extend a minimal language of meta-cinema and narrative possibilities. To propose a question: If the dialogues of a film are tampered by a computational algorithm, can it generate a new narrative possibility?
During the round of dialogue playing, an unexpected plot emerges. The generative dialogues became meaningless and illogical as time goes on, which echoed the conversational state of ambiguity and emotional relationship in Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux.
