With GIMA Filter, Anything is Possible
Introduction
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Taiwan’s Golden Indie Music Awards (GIMA), this promotional video was created to showcase ten exclusive GIMA filters, each designed by a different artist. Drawing inspiration from 1990s tech infomercials and home shopping aesthetics, the filters—originally digital—are reimagined as vintage software boxes, paying tribute to the material culture of early consumer tech.
The familiar Windows XP green-hill-blue-sky wallpaper is cleverly transformed into a physical set: a table made of "grassy desktop" and a backdrop of "blue skies and white clouds," creating a humorous visual illusion where the digital meets the tangible. Hosted by the charismatic “Mars Man,” the video features exaggerated sales pitches and mock user interviews, immersing viewers in a surreal retro-tech experience.
The video also incorporates a distinct audiovisual strategy common in 1990s Asian television—retaining original Western visuals while dubbing the audio in the local language. This deliberate image-sound disjunction produces a sense of cultural dislocation and irony, highlighting the tension between global visual codes and localized linguistic performance.
At its core, the work can be read as a form of media archaeology. Rather than indulging in nostalgia, it excavates and reanimates obsolete media aesthetics and formats to provoke a deeper reflection on how digital culture was once imagined, consumed, and embodied. Through a playful collision of retro visuals, fractured dubbing, and speculative media history, the video offers a humorous yet critical engagement with the overlooked residues of the digital past—revived not merely as memory, but as cultural material open to reinterpretation.