《人工剧团》自述
文/张巍
关于戏剧的情结来源于我的家庭。我居住的剧团大院充斥着各类扮演与观看，剧团生活丰富了我对古今中外各类角色的认知。可伴随着时代的变革，戏曲在悄悄地进行着变化——逐渐在传统的、地方的、民俗的文化艺术中引入流行、时尚以及外来的内容，相互交杂糅合，呈现出一种混杂、荒诞和无序的快餐审美。这种审美触及到了文化的底线及我的体验边缘，却使我产生了对它探究的兴趣。这样的改变不仅仅发生在剧团，它发生在这个时代的任何角落，理清这种变化是我在创作《人工剧团》这组作品之初的目的。
对于创作方式来说还要追溯到2007年，当时我完成了作品《临时演员》（Temporary Performers）的创作，期间收集拍摄了300多个中国普通人的面孔。2008年，我遇到一款日本的电脑游戏《人工少女3》，是一款由ILLUSION开发的3D-18禁恋爱养成游戏。这个两年的创作经历让我萌生了一个想法——创造一个虚拟的人？甚至是一个世界。
现实生活中，渴望成功的人往往因为不能如愿而失意，虚拟的网络游戏，却能带给处于游戏身份中的人们一种成功的感受。整个游戏都是从“人”这个基本的身份开始，由你为他设定性别和基本外型，并确定其人格特质。如同网络游戏中对角色的塑造，我便将《临时演员》的中演员的身份虚拟化，夸张地应用到《人工剧团》的角色当中——创造其神话性——用标志人物来淡化人物本来的演员身份，使其“表演”的成分更加荒诞。在表现上，我借用了电脑游戏式的人物虚拟方式，选取一些我喜欢的人物形象作为演员扮演的对象，将数以百计真实的普通演员的身体局部重新进行拼贴组合，利用每个演员与经典人物形象之间的微小相似点，包括肤色、头发等细节。通过人工互换，上百位演员原始的真实形象消失不见了，呈现在眼前的是一个崭新的虚拟肖像。这些家喻户晓的肖像不再是“灵魂或精神”的载体，而是变成了具象的图式，有种物化的变异之感。
整个过程虽然是一种假设，但却是一种精神上的真实体验。我还试图通过这种被篡改和处理后的冷面告诫人们，其实每一个人在社会中都在扮演着各自的角色，但终归都是表面的、临时的，甚至可能无意义的。我对这些虚拟构建的形象没有确切意识形态的评价，因为它或许是延异的一种方式。身体，作为灵魂的载体，一举一动，联系着内外世界，表象在《人工剧团》这组作品中被我打散、聚合，探究真相怕也只能是岩壁上的虚影而已。
STATEMENT of Artificial Theater
My theater complex came from my home. I live in a theater's courtyard filled with playing and watching. The theater life enriched my knowledge about various roles at all times and in all countries. Time was changing the opera gradually. The pop, fashion and foreign elements were added into the traditional, local and folk culture and art, showing a hybrid, absurd and disordered fast-food aesthetic. This aesthetic touched the cultural bottom line and my experience edge, but I wanted to explore it. Such a change occurs not only in the theater, but in every corner of the times. In the beginning of creating Artificial Theater my objective was to clarify this change.
Talking about how to create the series I must go back to 2007, when I finished the series Temporary Performers. During the creation, I collected more than 300 ordinary Chinese faces. In 2008, I met a Japanese computer game "Artificial Girl 3", which was a 3D 18X love game created by ILLUSION. The experiences in the two years brought me an idea, creating a virtual person, even a world.
In real life, people who are eager for success often get frustrated by the failures, however, the virtual network game can bring players through identities a successful experience. The game starts from a basic identity "people", for whom you can set the gender, the general shape, and the personality. Likewise, I virtualized the identities in Temporary Performers and used them in an exaggerated way to create myth-like roles for the new series. By diluting the performers' original identities I made their performances more absurd. Borrowing the virtualizing method in computer game, I selected my favorite figures for the performers to play. I assembled and collaged the parts of the real ordinary performers' bodies, using the tiny similarities between them and classical figures, including the skin, hair and other details. Through artificial exchange, hundreds of performers' original true images disappeared, showing new virtual portraits. Not as carriers of "soul or spirit"any more, these portraits known by everybody became figurative schemata, feeling like materialized variations.
The whole process is a hypothesis, but for spirit it's a real experience. I also try to warn the people, through these cold faces after tampering and processing, that in fact, everybody in the society is playing his role, but this playing is superficial, temporary, or even meaningless. I won't judge these virtual images ideologically, because they may present a way of differance. The body, as the carrier of soul, is linking the inside and outside world by every act and every move. The presentation in Artificial Theater has been broken and combined again, and if you want to explore the truth, you may only find shadows on the rock.