2091 – Ascension/登楼叹 (documentary 2021 )

spacetime coordinates: early 21st c China

directed by Chinese-American producer & director Jessica Kingdon

produced by Kira Simon-Kennedy and Nathan Truesdell

music: Dan Deacon

“The film follows the Chinese dream (中国梦) through the social classes, prioritizing productivity and innovation.” (wiki)

According to an opinion piece published on Qiushi (the leading official theoretical journal of the Chinese Communist Party), the Chinese Dream is about “Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism, and national glory”.

I am going to jot down a few quick thoughts after a fresh viewing of the new immersive documentary made by Jessica Kingdon – as it is one of the best recent documentaries about China. When one sez “China” one should be very skeptical – since the whole topic is now politically and emotionally charged. There are stakes on all sides from a growing quite dangerous sinophobia, discrimination, and racism against people of Asian origin around the world. There are many points of contention and everything feels to add to the previous biases – including accusations of alleged forced ‘sinicization’ of minorities, crackdowns and labor camps for ethnic Uyghur minority in Xinjiang & minority religious groups (especially Moslems), a crackdown on HK (one country two systems), fears over Taiwan, the continuing debate surrounding zoonotic spillover event at the wet market in Wuhan including the Biden’s administration recent military buildup as a response to both Russia & China. One should never make a sandwich out of these separate issues. The most dangerous at the time I think is the old imperial ‘Unipolar Moment’ US-led saber-rattling. Warmongering is hot at the moment, the old frames don’t help and what we are living is not a new Cold War but more of ‘hot peace times’ (as Zizek put it in long-read about the war in Ukraine) where inflammatory rhetoric covers up a much more mundane & business as usual reality. That said, Zizek himself has been a strong critic of what he used to call in an Al-Jazeera interview the (non-)alternative to the English neoliberalism “Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values”. No matter of you call it that or “State-led capitalism with Confucian Characteristics” (as Chinese themselves sometimes prefer), there is a lot more to be said and I don’t think one can have a monolithic position at this shifting crossroad, especially when China is the only contending world power that still believes in some form of multilateralism & noncynical win-win globalism. In the West, it becomes easier and easier to dismiss or ignore the diversity of the contemporary ideological field in China, including its various currents and countercurrent of orthodox or heterodox economical thought that have shaped and continue to influence its policy issues today.

What is clear is that Chinese media is being too easily labeled nowadays as “state-affiliated” media as if the western media is free of any affiliations or strings attached. In response we should label various western media outlets, Twitter now as Musk-affiliated or Bezos-affiliated (Washington Post) media. I find this a ridiculous hyperbole, an example of shameful double standard, a forgetfulness by Big Tech that is trying to rebrand itself as ‘national asset’ in the New Cold War. Apart from a divergence explained by commercial rivalries, there’s a lack of social media overlap btw Big Tech and local Chinese tech companies and platforms explained by the specifics of China’s ‘Ascension’ since the 1970s libéralisation and gradual opening towards today’s economic modernisation. Chinese innovation is thriving today because of this wise divergence in policy – they learned to exist and develop because the Big Tech was regulated by the Chinese state giving local startups a chance in the face of the Californian tech behemoths. So this disconnect has been partially useful and intentional +yet we’re living a cultural-linguistic & EuroAmerican – centric disconnect from the Sinosphere (the online world of wechat, Douyin, Weibo, Bilibili and more) – insuring a lot of misunderstandings and the usual faux pas. Purging the US. academia & technoscience as a response to current strategic realignment & divestment is not the answer (without considering the “role of firms from core capitalist countries in industrial relocation to and foreign direct investment in the PRC“). Not that social media can ever clarify anything, even while it vows to filter disinformation – it’s just that one can only see the big bubble of the others, not one’s own… There are many post-digital folklore anthropologists and social media sociologists and documentarists changing all this and I am grateful to them. While at official levels (policy, diplomacy, politics) there is this monologue about US-Chinese decoupling, ‘new cold war’ dangers, economic nationalism, the ground level transitioning away from a unipolar (US-centered) world requires both artistic & documentarian skills – since there are preciously few bridges. Otherwise, we will fail miserably, being blind to how interconnected things are or what kind of East-West dialectics is there afoot.

China is understandably wary of any Western involvement in its internal affairs and has sound historical reasons for that, yet it also tries to diversify its own exterior presentation & identity, while being at the same time busy solving its national (internal) unprecedented problems (slowing economy, aging population, ecological green energy transition, cracking down on tech giants, regulating & curbing the real estate boom + the managing its worst COVID lockdown crisis yet). Whether we understand, empathize or not, 21st c China is in a continuous dialogue with the outside world. China knows what it has to face, no matter what skeptics are saying. It also tries to do something nobody ever tried in the history of humanity, to take seriously all these challenges and not be cynical about it or over-confident. China is not trying to lay low and double down, pretend they’re not there and just let a few reap the benefits of “disruption” or Schumpeterian “creative destruction” (like the 2008 Crisis bailouts have demonstrated again and again).

Ascension – tries to fill this gap in many ways. It shows a diversified, socially ebullient world. It’s full of invisible overwork, myriad supply chains and also of fantastic vistas, and yes a billion dreams, wishes, artificial worlds, constant promotional feeds and the so-called “fan economy” or Wanghong economy of internet fame (like one of the Chinese streamer turned personal brand trainers sez in the docu). Ascension – the title has some religious ring to it – yet this is a very secular bootstrapping effort. It is zooming in on various, very difficult & still evolving aspects (from factory work to leisure, from previous external export orientation to internal markets) without transforming them into nefarious dystopian verdicts or snark remarks. Skills and tutorials seem to pervade this offline to online fluidity – people are constantly speaking into phones, recording DIY ads utilizing a mobile phone & selfie stick, pampering their image, making photo shoots, posting or making product placement, or learning how to promote their personal brand and train themselves into possible jobs and life choices while confronted with immense pressures to be materially successful and be a ‘super boss’ (garner fans) not just a boss (a boss without fans). One can see a much more accelerated version of Western neoliberalism, yet one can also see more experimentation – vernacular digitalisation, tryout of everything available. The movie does not comment or deconstruct. It does not ignore the whole breath of experiences and it also does not try to be exhaustive (how could it be in a billion people strong country?). Everything is spaced out, has a unreal feeling and this whole ecosystem of online Chinese celebs – influencers, gamers and consumer culture leadership seminars might be repulsive or feel oddly hyper-consumerist yet it is only part of the story. It all starts with what is lacking in most accounts of China – its migrant worker population (about 130+ million strong) being called by Foxconn recruiters on buses. These workers are the workers that have been most affected by the current lockdown. Workers doing highly repetitive work in the shop floor of the world, considered extinct (or unacceptable) in the West (old Fordist conveyor belts) while also watching soaps on their phones online.

From amazing (both toxic fume and surreal) scenes inside sex-doll factories to simple plastic bottle’s water filling to thousands of bikes, everything gets some form of coverage. It also records the in between talks of workers & managers, talk about ghosts in factories, fengshui swords, fragments and daily bits of “chit-chat”, people tired, nervous, janitors having small naps during work, getting an electric massage and training to become shock workers or bodyguards or butlers to the new well-off China’s rich. There is an intensity that is hard to convey, and there is a sort of exuberance & non-innocence that seems to go along with ‘working hard & party hard’.

I think it is completely wrong and foolish to focus on China mimesis of the West, this is completely the wrong alley for me. There is something else afoot and this documentary proves it. My deepest impressions are somehow turning around learning (the bad and the good, almost like throwing back in the face of the West its own Western superfluous étiquette or witnessing such a dedication for the basics of Western literacy). The very fact is that the people of China of all classes want internationalism, are becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, and are more than ever wooing the West. Are people in the West doing the same? Are they even putting an ounce of effort or interests to see beyond their ‘big noses’? I don’t think so.

What is important here is that it is not just an individual ordinary effort or state -sponsored or party led one – it is almost a communal effort to enjoy the newfound place on the international world & probe, go crazy with the incredible affordances that it’s hard to match – expanding infrastructure is offering (railroads, trains, IT, AR, online AI assisted tech, face recognition, virtual pay systems, QR core everything) water park arena events (simultaneously) with efforts to get better at everything – to learn everything, from science & tech to good manners to simple basic behaviors as useless (?) as smiling exercises or the ‘Western business étiquette hugging’. Let them hug you and hug them back as softly or strongly as they do!

That said – I would have liked more palpable experience of China’s vast new networks of public transport or its actual Research & Development ‘business parks’, incubators – all the state-private technoscientific capabilities (including its space exploration program) or the biomedical advances. There were snippets of subcultural milieus – yet this was indeed explored elsewhere in some detail(thinking of the amazing Shamate that I still haven’t seen). Also would have liked to see more about internal tourism -even its red tourism.

1976 – Out of the Present (documentary by Andrei Ujică 1995)

https://vimeo.com/325601048

Out of the Present is one of the most mind-boggling examples of documentary making (in my experience) to come out of what the Germans call “Wende”, the 1989 turn, or what in Romania is known as the – “tranzitie” – the protracted transition of the early 1990s after the Romanian Revolution. The Romanian 1989 Revolution is left as the only – brutal, bloody revolution. Yet we have another example maybe even more emblematic – because it had much more wider repercussions. The 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt also known as the August coup – is often depicted as the fight btw the reformists and the old guard soviet apparatchiks, with the reformist faction run by Boris Eltsin winning. Well, the result was the total collapse of the Communist Party and the immediate collapse of the Soviet State. In fact, in retrospect, this could be read as actually the first important step in the shock therapy economic measures – that have afflicted Russia, but all the other countries of the east bloc as well – be it Romania, Bulgaria (maybe not so much Poland and the Baltic nation-states). Another exception is CPR – China being one of those rare, maybe only countries that got forewarned and beforehand refused any structural liberalization of its core industries preferring instead a gradual liberalization from the margins, a dual pricing system and many other things which none of the previous examples followed (including Romania and Russia). In fact one can say that without first the annihilation of the party and the state, all the other – price liberalization etc privatization of industries, even the rise of the oligarchs and Putin – would have not been possible.

Andrei Ujică is one of the most accurate analyzers of mediatic sociological political mutations – and he helped Harun Farocki make the Videograms of a Revolution documentary in 1992 practically the best documentation we have about the first televised revolution – about the various framings, affective overflow and post-spectacle operations taking place on TV, with actual theatre actors becoming revolutionaries and so on. They were both digging into hours and hours of TV materials to be able to offer this comprehensive study of broadcasted images and audio-visualization of politics.

Out of Present is something else – it presents the Soviet Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev leaving Earth and CCCP for a space mission on MIR to return and reenter Earth in a new country called Russia. It is for me one of the most stark example of space dilation that does not take just its relativistic time consequences to their limit but also the subjective experience of somebody who is caught on orbit, who is dependent on a sort of terrestrial life support system that was on the verge of collapse, an infrastructure that brought Gagarin first in orbit, the first human to leave terrestrial space. It spans the entire collapse of the Soviet Union but from a cosmic perspective of sorts and during the routine of one of the most enduring dreams of humanity, the one that links communism with the exploration of outer space. There is much to be teased out of this documentary so I leave it up to the viewers. This documentary was included in the New Temporealities show at the Scena 9 BRD residency in Bucharest this year. Below is my text on it – for the room 7 of the exhibition where the movie was screened.

07 Out of the Present into Space

What happens when time plays tricks on you up there, when you rely on and depend on once-functioning life support systems, guided systems that put the first humans in orbit around the Earth? What happens when you depend more than ever on a space exploration infrastructure that sent you there, but which for the moment remains suspended? Abandonment is the occasion to get out of a continuous present, dislocated from that home that is no longer on Earth, the place where even the system that sent you towards the stars will soon cease to exist.

This portal, which measures the drift out of time and into unknown space, is discontinuous. Just as time becomes difficult to measure, suddenly there is a place where worlds are suspended, and far too quickly destructured and atomized. Many SF comics and cover artists felt the need to abandon drawing when they encountered the prowess of CGI post-production, because they felt 3D modeling was already fulfilling their purpose, delimiting all possible actions in advance.

The exit from the present takes place when everything is spatialized, leaving room for movement through the frozen time of others, even through the unimaginable speed of some spaceships flying over a fiery exoplanetary landscape far from here and now. Entering in instantaneous and short-term memory, images are no longer subjected to linear succession. The fast pursuit is no longer a pursuit but a suspension in between. It’s ready to happen, and yet it doesn’t happen.

 

1784 – “Shanzhai”, Future Mutations, Cosmotechnics and other books about China now

First some things about “Shanzhai” subculture and ethos.

Paperback, 224 pagesPublished February 20th 2020 by Pluto Press

Goodreads

‘Shanzhai’  from Cantonese slang, refers to the production of fake goods in China, which enjoy an anti-authoritarian-like dissemination across the global market. Starting with mobile phones, now fashion brands are subverted in this way, with many women at the helm of design and production. Fashioning China looks at the women designers simultaneously subverting and reinforcing the nationalist-developmentalist, masculinist and technocratic dream of brands that are ‘Made in China’.

Broadening the digital labor debate beyond typical masculine and techno-utopic readings, Sara Liao studies the precarious practices of women trying to create sustainable and creative lives, vividly illustrating a fashion culture that exists online as a significant part of the digital economy.

Drawing on material from interviews, participant observation, archives, policy documents, films and advertisements, Liao takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the topic, charting out the politics of intellectual property rights, globalization, technocracy, patriarchy and nationalism in a non-Western context. 

A study of Samuel Butler, cybernetics and emerging technology in Shenzhen, China.

Absolutely love this book – "Future Mutation; technology, shanzai, and the evolution of species". pic.twitter.com/zYn1Xxu4fD

— Robbie Barrat (@videodrome) December 4, 2017

review

review

Goodreads

“A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism.” –Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing

From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world

In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today.

From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world.

FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Goodreads

How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007-8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.

Lindtner’s investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces–makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends–in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production–tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation.

Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence.

Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers

essay on Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics by Yuk Hui

notes on reading Cosmotechnics

Goodreads

This volume reflects on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West.

Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with postcolonialism and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene.

ebook, 289 pages

Published 2019 by Amsterdam University Press B.V.

download pdf

With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to transform from “made in China” to “created in China”. Mobilised as a crucial source for solid growth and “soft power,” creativity has become part of the new China Dream. This anthology engages with the imperative of creativity by aligning it to three interrelated phenomena: boredom, shanzhai, and digitisation. How does creativity help mitigate boredom? Does boredom incubate creativity? How do shanzhai practices and the omnipresence of fake stuffs challenge notions of the original and authentic? Which spaces for expressions and contestations has China’s fast-developing digital world of Weixin, Taobao, Youku and Internet Plus Policy opened up? Are new technologies serving old interests? Essays, dialogues, audio-visual documents and field notes, from thinkers, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers, contribute to explore, examine and problematize what is going on in China now, ultimately to tease out its implication to our understanding of “creativity”.