Useless Action III: The Invisible City

Site-specific Project Planned

by CHOU Shu-Yi

Premiere: Aug. 26–27, 2023 at Taipei Artist Village, Taipei, Taiwan

About Projection Design

Useless Action III: The Invisible City marks choreographer Chou Shu-Yi’s return to Taipei Artist Village (TAV), the site of his 2007 residency project. Repurposed in 2001 from an idle municipal property, TAV hosted numerous artists over twenty-two years before its demolition amid urban renewal in 2023. The rise and fall of this urban art space invites a sober, time-tinged reflection.

Video & Projection Designer, Lee Kuo Han, maps dancers and architecture into three narrative threads:

1. The Past Moment — Archival footage from Chou’s 2007 residency is projected onto a stationary wall; its “unchanging” surface embodies the stillness of time.

2. From Past to Present — Dance footage gathered across years and travels is projected onto the elevator doors as they open and close; shifting locations and bodies trace the flow of time.

3. The Present Moment — Current images of TAV’s building become studies in surface texture, projected across the walls to highlight spatial transformation.

Juxtaposing stationary walls and moving elevator doors, and layering different wall textures, the work stages a dialogue with the soon-to-vanish Taipei Artist Village.

Archival footage is overlaid onto the present site; afterimages of dancers from sixteen years ago meet the building of today.

The elevator’s opening and closing function as live “cuts”: projection alternates between protagonist and backdrop for the performer.

Doors open—live dancer leads; doors close—projection takes the lead. This switching rhythm sketches the site’s sense of time.

Live footage from inside the elevator is streamed and re-projected onto a corridor door inside the same building, creating an illusion of site displacement.

Audience shadows enter the projection plane, actively rewriting the image’s composition and temporal layers.

Textures sampled from the ground-floor atrium—the flooring and plant life—are collaged onto the wall, forming a site-specific montage of local materials.