Like a Ladder Like an Arrow
Lunar Maize Mooncakes, AR Puffins, Hong Kong Elvis & Gene Hackman's Birthday
Hello
It is now February, and January alone has already been an entire year’s worth of derangement. The weirdness whirlwind continues to accelerate. I hope this finds you are safe and well, however relative that is. As I have been saying on Zoom calls and emails and texts all year, I am “hanging in there, in the classic 1970’s cat poster sense” and am extremely lucky to be doing so. But wow, have my feline claws started to ache something fierce. I imagine yours have too.
Recent Writing
Here are two pieces that I wrote in the twilight blur of winter 2020:
For Art in America, I considered a recent wave of augmented-reality (AR) art initiatives and the medium’s inherent tension between radical visions and shiny, profitable spectacle. This piece was inspired by my ongoing research into the mutating relationship between artists and brands or corporate patrons, and particularly a few great books that came out in 2020 on the mid-century heyday where technology companies and their engineer employees directly helped foster the birth of media art. I mention “Making Art Work” by Patrick McCray in the piece itself and it’s really worth a read, as are two other surveys with their own spin, “Technocrats of the Imagination” by John Beck and Ryan Bishop, and “Think-Tank Aesthetics” by Pamela M. Lee. In writing the piece, I loved rediscovering the ManifestAR Manifesto for Augmented Art, which is only a decade old but reads both like an ancient scroll and still very timely. The hopes it presents for a truly radical AR art are as compelling as ever, but feel ever more difficult for a variety of reasons. Even those who are using the medium for the most experimental and politically-driven projects are still bound by the platforms and physical devices of huge nation-like corporations. In any case, the ManifestAR manifesto is still inspiring, and I find myself wishing for more “hidden”, delicate, surprising, anti-spectacle AR works to come.
“AR art is anti-gravity. It is hidden and must be found.It is unstable and inconstant. It is being and becoming, real and immaterial. It is there and can be found – if you seek it.”
For MIT Technology Review I was delighted to interview Xiaowei Wang, the Oakland-based writer, scholar, artist and designer about how rural China is shaping global technology (and vice versa) as explored in their crucial new book "Blockchain Chicken Farm". I have known Xiaowei for many years and been following their research throughout (see this earlier conversation we did for NYMag in 2018). The book became one of my favorites of last year especially at a time when travel back to China wasn’t possible - a form of virtual travel to the Chinese rural landscapes that Xiaowei reveals in entirely new ways. “Blockchain Chicken Farm” is not only a tour through geopolitics and the ideologies of technology, environment, and global capitalism with subtle ethnographic detail — it’s a speculative cookbook! A selection of Xiaowei’s ongoing project of “Sinofuturist Recipes” appear with instructions (and short fictions) on how to make mooncakes with lunar-grown maize, a porridge for AI, and more. [*As the piece is paywalled, here’s a little excerpt, and message me if you’d like to read the whole thing.]
Q: Even if they don’t cook them, what do you want readers to get from the Sinofuturist recipes in the book?
A: I’d love for people to say, “Hmm, I don’t have access to moon-grown cornmeal,” but to have a sense of wonder about the ingredients that are available to them, and to frame that reality as a weird form of fiction. To question “Why do we eat what we eat?” and understand how that relates to technological change. I was really inspired by a cookbook by Mary Sia, who talks about how in China you don’t get a lot of baked goods; you get a lot of boiled things, and that’s due to the fact that China simply didn’t have enough trees to cut down to generate as much heat as is needed in baking. For me that was a reminder of how what we cook is totally shaped by what is available, as a result of the technology that we use.
Also:
Xiaowei wrote a great short speculative piece on future-fashion for Guernica.
For Knight Foundation, Xiaowei together with another favorite thinker An Xiao Mina wrote on how the “Great Firewall” metaphor for the Chinese internet may not be relevant anymore (if it ever was), and might be more clearly understood by reframing as the “Great Shopping Mall”.
In light of the financialization of memes (meme-ification of finance) in recent weeks, it's worth revisiting An Xiao Mina's excellent book "From Memes to Movements" from 2019 on the far-reaching mutable power of viral symbols/signals.
Some More Things In No Particular Order:
RIP to Melvis Kwok, Hong Kong's own Elvis and a true King; he performed every night not he streets of Lan Kwai Fong for decades. In 2008 I was lucky to spend an evening with the legend himself, filming this little video clip as a promo for National Geographic's short-lived music channel (sorry for lo-res video, can't find the original!). I learned more about his rather bittersweet life from this obituary - glad that the NYT commemorated his passing. The news of Melvis’ death is just one of the many things that make my heart pang for Hong Kong, as it does several times a day, for all that is changing and being lost there now, and most importantly for the friends, colleagues, artists, former students, former teachers, and beloved strangers whose are facing it in realtime.
Reading/Watching/Listening
In the waning hours of 2020 I put together some of my favorite books I read last year (many new, some old) and made a Bookshop list in case you’re interested - whatever affiliate pennies may accrue will be donated to Pages and Time, a local California non-profit getting books to incarcerated people.
January 30th was the birthday of actor Gene Hackman, one of my all-time favorites, so in honor of him I clipped this crucial line of dialogue from the underrated 2001 David Mamet movie “Heist” (spoiler alert: it’s about a heist). It may not be “The Conversation”, or even “Night Moves” (which I only saw for the first time this year; an incredible psychosexual Floridian-noir), but Hackman is as grumpy-iconic as ever in this exchange with Sam Rockwell, an aspiring member of his heist crew. It gets funnier each time you watch it.
Images
The paintings in this newsletter are all by Sadamasa Motonaga (1922-2011), a Japanese artist who was a founding member of the post-WWII avant-garde group Gutai. While his early works affiliated with Gutai encompassed everything from expressionistic drawings to site-specific forest sculptures, I am particularly drawn to the color-soaked, bulbous abstraction of certain later works like these. Some of them also have incredible titles (see below). Here’s a short booklet about his work from a show at Repetto Gallery.
I often think about “what is the style that comes *after* the millennial aesthetic/Corporate Memphis/etc", and the style that feels both bracing and balmy for my tired eyes is something in the neighborhood of these Motonaga works. In some other directions, I sense the surfacing through the visual ether of references like fellow Japanese artist/designer Awazu Kiyoshi, 1960s Polish film posters, the Shanghai-by-way-of-Paris-and-New York bon vivant Walasse Ting, Austria’s Hundertwasser, and the Australian 1980s pop painter (and souvenir impressario) Ken Done. There’s much more to say on this, but maybe we all just want to escape into color — any colors, all the colors, taste-defying colors— we haven’t been staring at within our walls for a year already. Our eyes want to pull our flesh to touch the textures we can’t feel through a screen.
Wishing you ladders and arrows as necessary,
shc
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Hello, I’m Samantha Culp, a writer, producer, and strategist based in Los Angeles after many years in greater China. You’re receiving this because you signed up via my website, or an event, or perhaps we even know each other from the offline world (wild!). Feel free to unsubscribe at any time by clicking here.
Note on the title: much of my work explores peripheries, faultlines, liminal spaces, hybrid phenomena. The edges, the overlaps, the places where things bleed together. The “Border Studies” newsletter includes things that I have been working on and thinking about, alongside selected artefacts worth reading, hearing, watching.
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