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| 引發一場變形：劉玗《假使敘述是一場洪水》的感官沉浸與生態閱讀 |
| Effects a Metamorphosis: Sensory Immersion and Ecological Reading in Liu Yu’s If Narratives Become the Great Flood |
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| 作者 |
謝佩君 |
| Author |
Pei-Chun Viola HSIEH |
| 關鍵詞 |
劉玗、
錄像藝術、
洪水神話、
沉浸、
環境人文主義
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| Keywords |
Liu Yu,
Video Art,
Flood Myth,
Immersion,
Environmental Humanism
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| 摘要 |
本文以臺灣藝術家劉玗的錄像裝置作品《假使敘述是一場洪水》（以下簡稱《假使敘述》）為研究對象，探討藝術家如何透過感官經驗的組織與調控，使洪水神話不僅作為可被理解、解讀的敘事內容，而轉化為一種可被身體直接經驗的流動狀態。本文指出，現有評論多將劉玗的創作歸類為沉浸式裝置，並傾向將「沉浸」理解為空間包覆性或全感官刺激的效果，因而忽略沉浸作為一種經驗形態，其感官與知覺如何在作品中被具體操作與編排的問題。
透過分析作品中動畫影像的節奏安排、插入文字的斷裂方式、人聲口白與吟唱的聲音層次，本文主張劉玗重新界定沉浸為一種感官系統的外部化過程。在此過程中，視覺與聽覺不再僅是再現敘事的媒介，而成為調控觀者注意力分配與身體節律的技術機制。此一前符號學（pre-semiotics）的感知狀態，使洪水神話得以在語意生成之前，被經驗為具有節奏、能量與生命力的動態實體。進一步而言，本文認為《假使敘述》可被視為一種對臺灣原住民洪水神話的生態式閱讀。作品對感覺與知覺的強調，不僅呼應原住民族知識體系中將身體視為環境延伸的理解，也與美國人類學家暨政治學者史考特（James C. Scott, 1936—2024）所提出之「洪水脈動」（flood pulse）概念形成對話。藉由將洪水理解為維繫生命循環的節律，而非單一的災害事件，本文提出，劉玗的創作不僅拓展了沉浸理論的分析維度，也提供了一種在災難語境中重新思考人與環境共生關係的藝術實踐。 |
| Abstract |
This article examines Taiwanese artist Liu Yu’s video installation If Narratives Become the Great Flood, focusing on how the work organizes and modulates sensory experience in order to transform flood mythology from a narrative meant to anchor understanding to a fluid condition directly experienced by the body. Rather than treating myth as a symbolic structure to be interpreted, the work foregrounds bodily sensation as the primary site through which meaning emerges. The article argues that many critiques categorize Liu’s practice as immersive installation art and tend to equate immersion with spatial enclosure or the production of totalizing multisensory effects. Such approaches risk reducing immersion to a formal or technological condition, and in so doing overlook immersion as a mode of experience in which sensation and perception are actively structured, regulated, and temporally orchestrated.
Through a close analysis of the work’s formal components—including the rhythmic pacing of animated imagery, the intermittent insertion of textual elements, and the layered deployment of spoken narration and chanting—this article proposes that Liu reconceptualizes immersion as the externalization of the sensory system. In this configuration, vision and audition do not primarily function as channels for transmitting narrative information. Instead, their rhythmic patterns, intensities, and repetitions operate as technical mechanisms modulating the viewer’s attention, affective response, and bodily tempo. The work thus produces a pre-semiotic perceptual condition, one that precedes stable meaning-making and suspends interpretive closure. Within this perceptual field, flood mythology is not encountered as a story with an origin or resolution, but as a dynamic entity endowed with rhythm, vitality, and ongoing force.
Building on this analysis, the article argues that If Narratives Become the Great Flood can be understood as an ecological reading of Indigenous flood myths in Taiwan. By emphasizing sensory experience over narrative explanation, the work resonates with Indigenous epistemologies that understand the body not as separate from its environment, but as continuously shaped by environmental forces and cycles. In this respect, the work enters into dialogue with James C. Scott’s concept of the “flood pulse,” which conceptualizes periodic inundation as the rhythmic condition sustaining riverine life rather than as a purely destructive or catastrophic event. Liu’s installation similarly reframes flood not as an exception or disaster to be overcome, but as a generative process through which life is sustained, transformed, and redistributed. By foregrounding flood as a rhythmic and life-generating force, rather than a symbolic motif or allegorical narrative, Liu’s work destabilizes anthropocentric
frameworks of disaster and challenges modernist paradigms of environmental control and management. The viewer is positioned not as an external observer of catastrophe, but as a sensing body attuned to fluctuating intensities and temporal cycles that exceed human agency.
Through shifting the discussion of immersion away from spatial totality and technological spectacle toward the modulation of sensory rhythms, this article contributes to ongoing debates on immersive media and installation art within contemporary art history. It proposes that Liu Yu’s practice not only expands the theoretical understanding of immersion, but also offers an artistic methodology for reflecting on human–environment relations under conditions of ecological crisis—one that privileges embodied perception over narrative meaning and emphasizes co-existence, resonance, and vulnerability over mastery and control. |
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