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Cross through the Magical Mirror, and Enter A New World!
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text by Jo Hsiao
Introduction
“Cross through the Magical Mirror, and Enter a New World!” is a collaborative exhibition. From the outset, the exhibition team – the curator, the artists, the art designers and exhibition technicians – collectively pondered the question: Whose “thinking” will the exhibition concretely express? Whose “position” will it declare? Will it defend any specific values? And will we be able to complete the exhibition collaboratively, from the overarching concept to the trivial details of implementation, given the entire logic of the curatorial methodology underlying art exhibitions to which we are accustomed? To describe the process in greater detail, the curator simply shared the exhibition topic and explained its motives. Then the artists joined forces with the administrative team and the curator to bring the exhibition to fruition, through a process of negotiation and compromise the exhibition’s aim, its financial limitations, and what goals were attainable. At a different level, the exhibition represents the culmination of a common purpose achieved through internal differences, mutual give-and-take, in which each person executed their work through their own professional roles. No matter how much the exhibition process was simplified, it is ultimately the summation of a mélange of art and politics.
“Cross through the Magical Mirror, and Enter a New World!” features three narrative environments that reveal the realities of the world we live in and imagine the new dimensions of the future. While “weee” centers on the human system – allowing voices of the individual and collective, assimilation and alienation to sound forth, as a way to examine many core questions of present-day civilization –”Personhood Prism” ponders humanity within the standardized, modular, systematized world of machines. Should we resist or unconditionally surrender? “The Yod” is a direct statement on the philistine values of human civilization, conveying a strong sense of renunciation.
The exhibition also features three large-scale installations, set up as a borderless extension, in the lobby, corridors, and the plaza. No signs or descriptions are placed on site, and the most minimum of invitations has been deliberately used. The works are not easily identifiable. Not only that, but the form of the works evokes in viewers a certain sense of self-consciousness, leading them to react with an everyday attitude. This framework of self-awareness arising from the form of the works may lead viewers to uncritically merge with the works. This suggests that the works liberate their emotions and serve as a mode of responding to real life. Yet in this form of art in which the viewer has a powerful sense of being inserted into the contents of the work, there seems to be a distance between the viewer and the works. This distance cools their emotions while also arousing their rationality, stirring their imaginations regarding the works and allowing them to construct a narrative from their own “performance.”
Act 1: The Human Realm
We are a collective formed from many independent I’s. We lead, finish and form Us. We oppose, restrain and question one another. Sometimes, I may disentangle myself from Us and become an Other. Or we may decide to join another Them.—— Clockwork Noses, “weee”
To project possible scenarios for the future of the world, scientists have proposed a new hypothesis – the “Anthropocene” – as a means to examine how humans are constructing a new global system through technologically generated structures: The rise of a technological ecosystem is truly amazing! This new ecosystem digitizes all things, both living and inanimate, and replaces them with a new construct centered on knowledge, information, and technology.[1] Confronting this new era, humankind is not only witness to everything, but is also actively configuring a new history of the world through new media (technology). In the words of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard: “[T]he period of production and consumption gives way to the ‘proteinic’ era of networks, to the narcissistic and protean era of connection, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface.”[2]
And so, the world is being reconstructed, forcing humanity to undergo an unprecedented transformation: With the advancement of technology, the Second Machine Age has commenced, and digital media are creating an ever better world at an ever faster pace. This gives us no choice but to acknowledge and comprehend that our own position has completely changed. So in our feelings, faith, and behavior, how can we employ a modern moral standard to co-exist with the world? In a high-tech society, how can people set aside their disagreements, differences and disputations to form a new covenant with the world? In the future, will this planet enjoy greater prospects than we can imagine? Or will humankind find itself under existential threat in a world we ourselves have altered? What truths does historical experience offer us? How can we go on to write the next chapter of humanity?[3]
“weee” rhetorically suggests a stretching-out of the English word “we,” turning it into a term completely devoid of meaning. Or it may hark back to the Nintendo game console Wii, which has already passed into obsolescence in this ephemeral digital age. This playful term functions as a product name, highlighting the artists’ deliberate attempt to subvert visitors’ sensations. And as visitors enter the lofty space of the art museum, they discover sofas of disparate sizes, arranged in much the same way as a hotel lobby, affording a chance to rest and wait. Around the sofas are placed long, black acrylic boxes of different sizes, reminding visitors that their actions must be in accordance with a standard model deployed on site, and this will allow unpredictable events to occur. Within this highly gamelike and random structure, visitors can choose to act individually or to join a group. They must awaken their own consciousnesses, and use their own bodies to form their actions.
Whether it is solitary action or a certain number of participants acting collectively, visitors are confined to a certain set of game rules and unable to generate a standardized behavior pattern, yet they are very likely to experience many situations involving confrontation, conflict and lack of cooperation. The work is designed to induce the participants to communicate from within their subjective ideologies, exposing gaps and asymmetrical relationships. The black boxes in the venue are a key element concretely expressing the import of this work: that whatever happens in the moment serves not to convey the capturing of time, but to expose the desire of beholders to witness every event that transpires. Driven by desire, will they initiate action? Will it be the same action? Different actions? Empty action? As the action passes from one person to the next, the variables increase. This is a question of politics, not just time. Participating artist Mao-Kang Chen compares this entangled state of interpersonal communication to international politics or sports events. He observes, “People still have to deal with it by doing it and experience it all on their own: you jump into the game on the field and try hard, pulling at each other’s jerseys and getting your socks covered with dirt; you sit around the conference table, staring at one another, listening to the others’ words but observing their actions, guessing at their true intentions.”
Speaking purely of the artwork, the participants must take action in order for the full meaning to materialize, but they may also linger in a certain scenario within it, and thus exhaust or destroy the operation of all the events. This suggests that the structure of the work creates an event phenomenon that emerges between the polar extremes of order/disorder, uniformity/dissimilarity, peace/pandemonium. This phenomenon of events corresponds to a similar symbol at the spiritual dimension. “weee” must make use of ideas and appearances to make the participants’ actions meaningful, and can only be comprehended on the basis of “what happened” or “what did not happen.” If we understand this point, the totality of action is not framed around collective experience, but on the contrary is the result of the concepts that arise from the participants. This result may turn the artistic event on its head and transform the participant into the event itself.
With “weee” (2018), the art collective Clockwork Noses brings into being a collectively shared world of “us” and “them,” in search of a new way to imagine the operating principles of the human world through a system put in motion by people interacting together. They have deliberately created their installations using non-art materials, assembling them from everyday objects such as sofas, lamps, audio tapes and cassette recorders. This approach has a radical counteractive intent. Here, “everyday objects” are goods used in daily life. The hidden meaning is not an artistic act of provocation in imitation of Marcel Duchamp’s use of readymade objects, but rather an exploration of the human level of life. From a different perspective, abandoned electronic devices are obsolete objects, industrial products that stand as the abandoned relics of modern civilization, and their use sharply but humorously mocks the value of civilization. At the same time, the treatment of this spatial work is similar to that of a private room in a family home, evoking transference and powerful emotions in the visitor through the form of the work.
Finally, an art museum lobby is a place where visitors often wait, pause or converse. It is a “public space,” a “space between.” The art collective Clockwork Noses has made use of the special quality of this space to turn the lobby into a habitat of the imagination. Through assiduous planning, design and deployment, they have created a real space – but the more real it becomes, the more illusory it is. This group of young artists has attempted to redefine the nature of space, juxtaposing mutually contradictory milieus from the real world within a single physical context. According to Michel Foucault’s theory of social spaces, a heterotopia is a real physical space that projects an image, like the reflection in a mirror.[4] This work, however, confines the visitor within a space similar to a heterotopia, except that its intent is not to express the space itself, but to create a collective world shared by “us” and “them.”
Act 2: The Machine Realm
In Plato’s The Republic, the Greek philosopher describes a group of prisoners in a cave who mistake shadows on the cave wall for reality. In the eyes of the prisoners, the shadows of the objects they see in the darkness are the visible world, yet unbeknownst to them, there exists a real world of the soul, the mind, the intellect.[5] After nearly 2,500 years, this familiar Allegory of the Cave has finally materialized in the digitalized world! Just like the prisoners in the cave, we have become immersed in the fantasies of a virtual world. High-speed arithmetic processors have replaced the circuitry of our brains, converting reality into a binary numeral system of 0’s and 1’s.[6] Machines can transform human beings and our environment into data. We produce signals all the time, which machines analyze, classify, and store in our personal files. Thus, in an era when human beings are incessantly “digitalized” as data, it is disembodied digital entities that collectively generate our world!
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) might be surprised to learn that his dystopian novel Brave New World is what our reality looks like today! The book depicts the world in 2540 CE – not a world of feelings, or thought, or morality, but a world dominated by technology and totalitarian political control. In such a world of the future, the commonplace values of previous civilizations must be discarded. People’s souls, consciousnesses, thoughts, feelings and desires have lost meaning and therefore no longer exist. A gram of the hallucinogenic drug “soma” purges emotions, negates the will, and induces complete obedience. Modern technology provides a society based on “Community, Identity, Stability,” without contradiction, accident, or doubt. Technology (science), acting for the betterment of humankind, has eradicated the final shreds of humanity. We have gradually been supplanted by the “products” we have created ourselves, because these products are more advanced than we are.
At the end of the previous century, the invention and widespread use of the World Wide Web allowed us to span geographical and cultural boundaries, saving and sharing limitless information anywhere in the world, at any time. Today, we can use social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to exchange massive volumes of information in different forms – text, video, still photos. This digital revolution leveraging computer and network technology has thoroughly altered human history at an astonishing pace, as we witness the emergence of the mechanistic state of human society. This augers the standardized, modular, systematized world predicted by Huxley in Brave New World, in which the individual is cleverly controlled in the name of technology.[7]
In the introduction to L’homme nu (Naked Man), co-authors Marc Dugain, a French novelist, and Christophe Labbé, an investigative reporter for the French political news weekly Le Point, declare: “This digital revolution is not merely shaping our way of life in the direction of more information and faster connectivity, but also leading us toward a state of docility, voluntary servitude, and exposure, the final result of which will be the disappearance of privacy and the irreversible loss of our freedom.” (Éditions Plon, 2016) In other words, living in a digital village allows us to enjoy a host of conveniences brought by information technology, but through the application of algorithms, everyone on the internet will be digitalized and left naked.[8]
One online article, titled “Society’s Impending ‘Atomization’: Our Lives on Different Apps Are Becoming More and More Scattered” further contends that the internet has altered the model of interaction among people and between people and the world.[9] Nevertheless, lying in the background behind the atomization of society is the disappearance of the individual and the collapse of the family and social structure. In this age, human-to-human and human-to-machine exchanges are all extensions of machines. Through the mediation of machines, humans and objects no longer belong to separate camps. In the network of forms, all have been endowed with “personality,” and humankind is only one element within a virtual network.
Yet machines are media serving as extensions of people. As the late well-known Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) declared, “The medium is the message.”[10] The perceptual environment generated by technology is now viewed as a real environment. Machines have imported a network of messages generated by their internal settings, and all media have a profound influence on us. This suggests that as media dominate our consciousnesses and transmit signals to our brains, they profoundly influence the way we behave. As a consequence, people live within electronic media systems and form media tribes dominated by machines.
“Personhood Prism” is an enquiry seeking to understand the media of today. This new media work hints that our “personhoods” are being integrated through the mediation of machines. The work employs a mechanical device to extract the facial expressions and body movements of humans, renders them as a 3D animated avatar, and endows “it” with the characteristics of life. Here, a simulated persona forms empathetic bonds with people, and moreover, human bodies and consciousnesses genuinely intertwine with a machine. This makes us aware that “it” can become a duplicate of a human consciousness. In Shih Yi-shan’s design, the strongest and most powerful part of the work is the production of three public forums using machine systems. In these three forums the speakers can instantly interact with avatars through real-time computing technology, while also interacting in real-time with viewers via the Internet.[11]
The three forums include “An Act of Enslavement Seemingly without a Leader”, “Face Scan Guerrilla Warfare under the Domination of Skynet”, and “The State of the New Alliance in the Artistic Imagination”. The first forum, “An Act of Enslavement Seemingly without a Leader,” ponders our fate living in a digital village: while we enjoy the convenience of information, we are also being digitized by internet algorithms, which strip us naked. The digital revolution has ushered us into an undifferentiated way of life, subserviently reliant on mobile apps and social media to exchange information, share knowledge, buy things, be entertained and make friends. Nowadays, both people and things live in the cyber world. We/they are given a kind of “personality” within a network of forms. Human beings are just one of the elements in this virtual network.
The second forum, “Face Scan Guerrilla Warfare under the Domination of Skynet,” extends further to explore the recent phenomenon in China, perpetrated by government agencies and private companies alike, in which facial recognition systems are encroaching upon many areas of private life, such as detailed documentation of people’s public behavior, credit ratings, and purchasing records. In China facial recognition technology is described as “face scanning,” originally an ironic term arising from interpersonal culture on the internet. Within an algorithmic framework, our faces have become data. They have become currency, the basic interface between individuals and society. This intimates that our faces hold within them all personal information, reaching to every dimension – personal, political, economic, moral, and ethical. The second forum focuses on how this revolution will impact the societies and cultures of the future.
In the final forum, “The State of the New Alliance in the Artistic Imagination,” two artists grapple with a radical age that is constantly evolving, in which the world is made of machine systems. Through the use of art, they attempt to bridge the real world and the digital world, to strike a balance between them, to create a new alliance. Here, the unique nature of art serves to connect them and enlarge the loop that encompasses them, to place all the things that belong to these two worlds on the same plane, and to extract speculative dividends by focusing on the fundamental nature of media.
In “Personhood Prism” four 90-inch LCD monitors are embedded in two black walls. These black TV walls evoke a feeling of heartlessness and distance in visitors. This form produces an overly rational sense of “coldness.” Shih Yi-shan attempts to classify, analyze and reflect on the position of human beings in this contemporary society, which is centered on technology and industry: When everything human is completely and thoroughly transformed by machines, everything – be it individuals, communities, politics, the economy, morals or ethics – is impacted and altered. This a profound meditation on how human beings must confront their own existence in the current day.
Act 3: The Realm of Nature
The Eastern Jin-dynasty literati Tao Yuanming imagined a “land of the peach blossoms,” a paradise on earth hidden within a forest of peach trees: fertile fields and beautiful ponds, groves of mulberry and bamboo scattered about, paths crisscrossing through the fields, neat houses, chickens clucking, dogs barking, and people working in the fields. Old folks and children are contented and happy. The story tells of the descendants of a group of people who hid in the forest to escape the ravages of war, dwelling in this place set apart from the world. When Heidegger dissected the phenomenon of “the world,” he observed that we interact with the world by projecting ourselves within it and initiating a mode of pure “dwelling” in a certain place. This kind of dwelling allows us to comprehend how we genuinely exist in the world, thus completing our understanding of all that exists. Heidegger’s existentialism is founded on the concept of human existence and proposes that human lives are different from the lives of other living creatures, in that we can display individuality and project it upon the world we inhabit.[12]
In the Taipei Fine Arts Museum plaza, the artist Chen Hui-chao has created a flower garden, a floral sea formed by the “cosmic flower” – the garden cosmos. Here, she has also installed three swings, positioned to constitute an isosceles triangle, formed by two 150° aspects and one 60° aspect. In astrology this triangular configuration is known as “The Finger of God” or, in Hebrew, the “Yod.” The artist has arranged the scene as a dreamscape, a meditation on the mysterious force of the universe, and an expression of reverence for nature. In “The Yod” the garden graces the venue with spirituality, in which material objects transcend surface appearances to form a powerfully contagious scene before our eyes, not simply a concrete expanse of flowers, but a realm filled to the brim by the imagination. That is to say, a richly imaginative and idealized site has become a sublime, limpid and beautiful fantasyscape.
And perhaps, in line with a philosophy of simple living, she has endowed basic human archetypes with the emotive experience of life. If only people closely observe life itself, they will discover that the myriad objects and creatures in the world all obey their own laws – they possess a mysterious existence, a real existence, reason and feelings, delight and revulsion. The many scenes that appear before our eyes are all fluidly flowing like water, symbolizing an ineffable spirituality. And the swings – mechanical devices that play at a state of equilibrium – express that a rational perspective can be seen as an objective reality.
In the eighteenth century, English painting embraced “the theory of the picturesque,” extolling nostalgic, sentimental scenes that stirred the emotions. The portrayal of ruins, water mills or insignificant human affairs manifested an experience of beauty juxtaposing divergent elements. Such aesthetic experiences delivered an awareness of “beauty” that transcended the rational level and indeed stimulated a perception of the “sublime,” affording comprehension of an aesthetic perspective that superimposed different scenes in ways that defied credulity.
“The Yod” employs a proliferant scene to strike visitors’ sensorial perceptions. Immersing them in a real environment, it summons powerful feelings, thoughts buried in the depths of the human psyche, and the deepest entanglements binding them to the existing world. Or to put it a different way, Chen Hui-chao employs zodiac signs to symbolize the energy of the cosmos, filling the venue with an atmosphere of mystery. Employing an almost visceral yet quite rational logic, she sculpts a picturesque garden for us to linger in. Perhaps, in some corner here, we can rediscover the delicate side of humanity!
Collision Point
At this juncture, the world generated by machines has become the dominant source of disintegration of the mechanisms of social cohesion in human society. Humankind has deployed a matrix of technology so complicated it requires the use of machines to operate, and ultimately we have discovered that the state of our own existence has changed: Initially, human beings employed technology as a means to subjugate the world, but this has led to the fragmentation of interpersonal social relations and mutual alienation, and this mutual isolation within a machine-generated world has made us slaves to our own tools. As the fundamental structures of society – individuals, families, communities – are damaged, we have all become prisoners in Plato’s cave, shackled to disparate parts of the world, atomized.
Humankind has collectively abandoned the real world to “dwell” in a machine-generated world. By taking this soma, we still attain happiness, but we have lost our memory, no longer aware that beyond the machine world lies an even more genuine “peach blossom land” of the soul, mind and intellect. Today, the world of 0’s and 1’s transforms the signals collected from each person into data, like an advanced technology simplifying our understanding of the fundamental capabilities of things to render everything more efficient. In the 2017 science fiction movie Ghost in the Shell, human beings’ bodies have been replaced by machines, and all that is left are the consciousnesses stored within the mechanical shells. “Who are you? And who am I?” When Motoko discovers her own body is made of mechanical components, she is unsure whether she is human or non-human. Is she a ghost with a subjective consciousness, or a machine obeying all commands? Ultimately, to be human is to preserve one’s human nature, and to fight to keep it!
Our era is certainly an age of extremes, where the soul and its shell are at odds. The screenwriter of the British science fiction television series “Black Mirror” wondered aloud, with dark implications, “If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side effects?” The series broadly and deeply explores the impact of humankind’s plunge into the digital revolution. The title “Black Mirror” refers to the things we find “on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.” The series reflects the widespread anxiety of society and soberly examines how technology has become a frightening overlord with nonhuman power, ultimately depriving all ethics and morality of meaning. Put more precisely, the question at stake is: What is human value? For better or worse, in the future people will be implanted in screens like crystallized structures. All the possibilities regarding life, thought, and the perpetuation of humankind will converge. Under the azure sky, people live somewhere between delight and discomfort, in a moment of both extreme excitement and darkness! When our own creations have taken control of us, should we fight to preserve our humanity or optimistically embrace the many benefits that technology brings to human society? If we measure human beings as the foremost among all creatures, the deepest and most central issue we have pursued for thousands of years, through art, philosophy, religion and science, is neither reminiscing an idyllic past, nor fabricating an imaginary future, but glimpsing our own place within the process of cosmic evolution and searching for our own value.
The 19th-century French realist writer Honore de Balzac, in his Treatise on Modern Stimulants, noted five varieties of stimulants that for the previous 200 years, since the 17th century, Europeans had found irresistible: alcohol, sugar, tea, coffee and tobacco. Similarly, people of the 21st century are ever more addicted to technology, and dependent on it to live. This is a revelation – the total domination of a nonhuman power, the ultimate alteration of all human values.
In his novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) quotes “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” by the British poet William Butler Yeats:
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through
Compared to other living creatures or non-living entities, humans have been endowed with archetypes through the sensorial experiences of life. Under the azure sky, can human beings regain our own thoughts, feelings and beliefs? Within the universe, do human beings possess the ability to keep on living without confronting our own phantoms? One day, humankind will finally become aware of the threat of being “decommissioned” by our own machines and take action. “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” (George Orwell, 1984) The first two acts of “Cross through the Magical Mirror, and Enter a New World!” projected speculations on the “Human Realm” and the “Machine Realm.” Lastly, Chen Hui-chao not so much recreates as embeds an ideal world formed from a garden environment: a world where people can linger. This garden draws us irresistibly into a whimsical dimension verging on a dream. And the true meaning of this fantasy pivots toward an inquiry into the real world. In this exhibition, a series of descriptive texts and narratives manifests the peach blossom land hidden beneath true human emotions, and the crystal world brought into being by the black magic of science. No matter how inescapable they are, most people must confront this duo of specters. This is the most profound collision point of the contemporary predicament. Let’s cross through the magical mirror, and enter a new world!
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Cross through the magical mirror, and enter a new world!
Curator by Jo Hsiao
Date: July 21 - December 02, 2018
Opening: 2018.07.21, 14:00PM
Venue: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Lobby、Gallery 1A&1B、TFAM Plaza
Organizer: Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Artists
Act 1: Clockwork Noses, “weee”
Date: July 21 - October 07, 2018, Main Lobby
Act 2: Shih Yi-shan, “Personhood Prism”
Date: August 11 - October 07, 2018, 1A & 1B Corridors
Act 3: Chen Hui-chao, “The Yod”
Date: September 29 - December 2, 2018, Plaza
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[1] The impact of human activity on the planet today has led scientists to hypothesize that we are entering a new geophysical era: the Anthropocene.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” collected in The Anti-Aesthetic, Hal Foster, ed., New Press, 2002, p. 145-154.
[3] Advancements in digital technology are enabling scenes from science fiction novels to be acted out one by one before our eyes. With search engines, ad servers and data-mining algorithms, numerous forms of information and media have been reduced to digital data. Nearly everything in the human world has been digitalized, so that at a super-fast velocity we have found ourselves living in the Second Machine Age.
[4] “Heterotopia” is French philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory of social spaces. A heterotopia is a real physical space that functions as a prism, refracting the things that people place inside it and serving as a foundation for mutual reference with the real world.
[5] In Book 7 of The Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE) wrote his “Allegory of the Cave.” In a subterranean cave, everything our senses contact is only a shadow. Everything that exists is illusory. Outside the cave is a world entirely lit by sunlight, in which the true forms of knowledge genuinely exist.
[6] The binary system is employed widely in computer systems; all commands and data must be converted into 0’s and 1’s in order to be processed by computers.
[7] In an open letter, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, listed three major challenges facing the internet: 1) We’ve lost control of our personal data; 2) It’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web; and 3) Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding.
[8] “In the age of Big Data, our ‘personal information’ has been reduced to mere ‘data,’ through search engines, ad servers and data-mining algorithms. Data has become a crucial determinant of an individual’s existence!” Quote from: Marc Dugain, Christophe Labbé, L'homme nu – La dictature invisible du numérique (Paris: Plon, 2016).
[9] Jin Qiaoye, originally titled “Generation Gap,” first published on the Chinese website ciweigongshe.net.
[10] In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan proposed that the special characteristics of media, rather than the content they carry, are what influences society. This book is considered a seminal study of media theory, and the author has been hailed as a prophet of the 20th century.
[11] These three forums made use of the TomoLive real-time audiovisual interaction system. Using algorithms operating nearly instantaneously, it allows performers wearing special equipment to manipulate 3D digital avatars.
[12] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Chapter 13.
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