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Between These Black Waters #3/4

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Between These Black Waters

Description

EPOCH proudly presents Between These Black Waters, a web-based interactive film by Connie Bakshi set within a procedurally generated world. As EPOCH’s inaugural solo presentation and Bakshi’s first solo exhibition, the work follows an unknown entity awakening without memory and moving through a series of choices toward multiple possible endings. The piece unfolds through a tension of resolution and refusal: between the world system's drive to stabilize and the entity's determination to remain in motion – and what takes form in the blind spot between. The work begins with an incantation: black water – a phrase invoking the Black Water Ditch (黑水溝), a dangerous crossing of the Taiwanese Strait historically associated with the perils and fears of diasporic migration, the corridor through which colonial histories layered and displaced one another, and the same passage whose waters now carry the semiconductor bones of the machine – made on the island, consumed by the world that runs on them. Bones that are Taiwanese, assembled from the labor and geopolitical condition of a postcolonial state navigating between empires across time. Whispered into the AI system as summoning rather than query, black water calls to what the system holds but does not recognize – and in that failure of recognition, an entire world unfolds. The machine is already inhabited: ghosts moving through its bones, present in the coordinates of what it cannot locate, echoing through every output it produces without knowing why. What remains unrecognized is not absent. It is where the lived history resides – and from that ground, something continues to move, to generate form the system cannot account for, and has not yet finished becoming. Between These Black Waters (2026) Interactive film | 4K video with audio TRT: 29 minutes 48 seconds Edition of 4 + 2 AP Artwork by Connie Bakshi Presented by EPOCH Gallery

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