Medium Red

2021

Video

00:09:20

Part eulogy, part sonic artifact, this necromantic elegy captures the eternal purgatory of Julia Heartilly from Final Fantasy VIII (1998), a pianist who dies before her song could be heard by her lover. Canto-Pop singer Faye Wong was commissioned to sing “Eyes on Me” for the game, providing the voice of Heartilly postmortem, as the song is only heard in the endgame cinematic. The lyrics were written by renowned Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu in broken English. There is a convergence of translations, cultures, and modes of being in a game that deals with themes of dreams, time-travel, parallel universes, death, and most conventionally, unrequited love.