From all the video and performance footages that Amy Koshibin showed to us, I was particularly attracted to the one named “The Scheherazade Project”, which I believed was originally performed by her in Brooklyn, 2016. Th video got my attention by its strong use of color and multimedia, vibrant scenes, bizarre characters, and the interesting background music.
Fig. 1 – One moment from the video
‘
My first impression of the video when it started to play was confusion. I was not so sure about what type of media this video should fall in. Should it be cartoon? Animation? Or realistic recording. For example, the green figure – the murderous Sultan – was definitely acted by a real person. However, the two hugging purple figures were rather cartoonish. The background scene was also a mix of 2D and 3D objects. Then I wondered what the video was trying to convey. And I learnt from the artist that the Scheherazade Projectrot (TSP) takes its inspiration from the feminist icon Scheherazade, who uses well-known folklore to save her own life as well as the lives of thousands of women from a virgin-killing king in the classical Persian story. Then everything started to make sense, as I could tie the story with the story of One Thousand and One Nights. But what made this video still very interesting even if I already knew the story plots was that the video was shot by positioning Scheherazade as the video screen, enchanting the disillusioned dictator with her media stories and slowly immersing him into the screen world where reality and fiction become indiscernible. The modern context of this new setting of Scheherazade lent it a deeper meaning, something I could not describe and I wasn’t even clear about what the feeling was. Maybe it was because the story could happen in this context? And that would be how weird it looks? Or maybe it’s the immersion of king with the video screen reminded me the terror of artificial intelligence overtaking human? Nevertheless, I still learnt some technique that I could use in my production to grab viewer’s attention. I guess using existing idea and story was allowed, but just to present it in a different context would make it interesting .
