Edwin Lo

Birth : , Hong Kong

History

Edwin Lo is an artist and researcher working with sound in various contexts and media such as performance, text, recording, video, installation and video games. Lo received a Master of Arts from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His work was exhibited in several countries, including Hong Kong, United States, Berlin, Tokyo, Shenzhen, Paris, Brazil, Switzerland, Sweden, and Shanghai. His work was presented by the Goethe-Institut and Para/site in Hong Kong, the Tokyo Arts and Space, the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, Loop in Barcelona and Meinblau Projektraum in Berlin. His artist residencies include China, Germany, Japan. Lo lives and works in Hong Kong.

Movies

End Time and The Trajectories of Ancestors

Director

End Time and The Trajectories of Ancestors (2022) is a video (machinima) essay on the historical fragments of Montana and Native American history. Going deep into the American soil conveyed in the video game Far Car 5 (2018), the work manifests the juxtaposition between religious survivalism on the nuclear threat and End Time, the digital landscape and archive of Montana, and the historical records and testimonies of Native American’s history and movement. This intersection can be conceived as a detour in thinking and questioning the universal issues on colonization, land, race, violence and the appropriation of culture and history in the video game.

The Rupture of Promised Land (Or We Can Never Get There)

Director

Composed of material from the FBI Vault and the Jonestown Institute, this work consists of several sequences of monologues, confessions, and speeches by members and personalities of the United States and the Soviet Union. By juxtaposing this audio-visual archive with the video game Outlast 2, which was inspired by the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide, the film attempts to expose the abandonment of the quest for a Promised Land by Jonestown members. This abandonment, in the end, was also that of religious socialism.

Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It

Director

Those Who Do Not Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It (2020) is an experimental documentary investigating the intersection of People’s Temple (Jonestown) with the first-person survival horror game Outlast 2 developed by Red Barrel. Departing as the digital study of the game, this project attempts to recontextualize the relationship between the mass suicide of People’s Temple in 1978 and the game’s narrative. Composed by the archival materials from FBI and machinima made with the game, this work conveys uncanny audio and visual journey in the understanding the self-destruction, the religious utopia, the binary between capitalism and socialism.

Many Undulating Things

Sound

The film begins and ends in a shopping centre in Hong Kong. We carefully observe the smooth movement of the escalators, the constant flow of people that never stops, the musical fountain that presides over the centre of the internal courtyard, as if this gigantic complex could concentrate the circulation of the entire city, or even, the entire country. From there, it will be more a tale about concrete, enormous port warehouses, glazed galleries built for the 2010 universal exhibition, overpopulated tower blocks, the fragments of still recent colonialism...