“Horsegirl” at once signifies the digital girl riding a horse in the center of the video, as well as the implied girl whose computer screen is covered in stickers of horses. Horsegirl, then, is signified through a kind of paradoxical absent presence: while the screen is covered in stickers, signifying the presence of a real horse girl who would have placed them on and who the screen would belong to, she is not present in the space. Rather, we have the presence of a virtual horsegirl, likely piloted through the Sim’s town across which she trots by the same horsegirl who is absent to us. If, as Christian Metz tells us, “To ‘speak’ a language is to use it, but to ‘speak’ a cinematographic language is to a certain extent to invest in it,” then in this opening sequence we see Ma investing in the space of the computer screen—in its multiplicities and constraints—as a space through which her filmic language is elaborated (Metz, 101).

But this investment in digital space, most obviously the desktop with its images and the Sim’s animation of the girl riding a horse, is also tied into existential questions which appear explicitly in the video through the use of subtitling. Consider this line, for example, as a means of thinking through the complex set of significations that the space of the desktop might point to in Ma’s work. Recounting a dream, the narration reads: “The whole way to your house looked like Google map. (All my roads home look like Google Map.)” Here, home is interwoven into digital mapping technology, and the pragmatic need to use a mapping app to navigate home comes to undergird the psychic meaning of home itself. “All my roads home look like Google Map,” turns this dependency on digital space into an aesthetic description which is at once descriptive and obfuscating. At a certain point, every way anywhere looks like Google Maps. “Can simulated light uncover my way home?” the narration asks, further along in the video. Perhaps this question might serve as a way to bridge the divide between the virtual and real in Ma’s video. Even the “simulated light” from a video game becomes real the moment that we see it. The simulated map home can lead to a real space, even if—like the horsegirl who trots around a virtual town while remaining center frame—it can seem like one is hardly moving at all.

Essay Review by Zach Mclane 

LINK TO WATCH

VIDEO SCREENINGS
LA Artcore Sept-Oct 2023 Group show Fizzing Portals
Heart House Presents: Girl Crush / An Evening of Video and Software Based Art 2024
Yuchi Ma 2026 Solo Show: Pandas are Pandas

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