I want to begin discussing aaajiao’s works with a piece which I believe encapsulates one of his major concerns – the transference of meaning – and from there move onto other pieces that provide methodological examples of this concern and which will provoke some consequences of that activity.

The tiny jellyfish, Turritopsis nutricula, is an idealized organism for aaajiao, representing permanence, renewability, regeneration, immortality. This particular species of jellyfish gives us an idea of immortality based on its ability to revert to a previous generational stage and regenerate itself anew. For aaajiao this creature and the attributes that makes it so interesting to science matches his concerns with the permanence of data, the possibility of the stability of meanings, and the physical expression of this stability.

The artwork Turritopsis nutricula reproduces the jellyfish in digital form. As the jellyfish touches on immortality in life, so the artwork touches on this idea of the immortality of data as an immortality through change, stressing the mutability of data as part of immortality, and an understanding of it as it goes through its stages. Data goes through many processes – meaning being just one of them, and meaning—“having” meaning—is just one state, one particular meaning in itself. The relationship of data to art begins with these attributes as ways of representing things. They are both prototypical methods of representation. It could be said that at its base art is nothing but representation, a simulation of a world of simulation where, as soon as we approach it, everything is symbolic of something other in an endless movement.

In his works in general, aaajiao focuses on the use of data and its various forms of display, in so doing pointing up problems with the movement from reality, to data, and back again – how meaning is understood through this process, processed through these various forms and then re-presented (as fact, or otherwise), and also how art manages these situations. More than with meanings themselves, aaajiao’s pieces seem to play with these meaning-transfer systems that data resides within.

So we have two discrete stages – the first being data and the process of its formation into structures. Then the structures themselves, which organise the data and are used to represent things beyond the data parts. Context assists in the understanding of data/structures, it is in some ways essential to the understanding, but the relationship between data/structures and context is a fraught one. At the same time as the structure is representing, it somehow loses touch with its data. In the other direction, upon reception the audience loses touch with the data’s original context and creates a new context within which to understand the data. By simplifying in order to be understood, to a point where we hope we can transfer the meaning without losing data or meaning, actually we have removed an important aspect of that data. Complexity and simplicity, context and lack thereof, all in their ways work towards the transference of meaning and at the same time prevent it from taking place.

This is not to say that there is necessarily a privileged meaning, e.g. valuing an “inherent” or original meaning over one that occurs later in the process. This is as much to say that any artist that claims to deal with meanings, must be aware of the fallibility of the processes that they choose to rely on. It’s not about meaning at all, it’s about communication – communication judged as an effective transference of meaning between participants. So, as I say, I believe aaajiao often takes on this process as an overarching concern. The surface meanings, and the data involved make up a scenario in which the process of communication can be tested.

With similar concerns to Turritopsis nutricula, Blog weighting is specifically set up to “study the permanence of data”, in this case the projection of value onto a mass of information. This data originates from a historically significant blog, this mass of significant data saved on to a chip. The chip is then weighed, giving an indication of the value of this data interpreted another way.

In “reality”, although the mass of a chip cannot change dependent on its data content, its form does: inside the chip, imperceptibly, tiny switches are flipped this way or that, the resulting electrical currents are the effects of these states and represent “data”. Nothing then is physically added or taken away, save the analysis that is imposed on these currents, as read by the system and which go through a series of interpretations, until presented phenomenologically, reaching the level of perception, a point at which something is designed to be perceived and thus leaves the realm of electronic interpretation, entering the world of human interpretation and thence feelings. So in this piece to read the weight of the chip and present that visually represents a criticism of the nature of the chip and its data.

Again. In GFWList, rather than representing an actuality, an invisible mass of data represents a meaningful form: here the black Monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, which is then encrypted, hiding the meaning of the data. This representation of an object that in the storyline holds advanced meaning but in the film is beyond our understanding. In 2001, with its own famously obscure story, the Monolith (perhaps) promises to be a link between universes, so it is appropriate that aaajiao is using the gfwList in this piece. The final form of the artwork, the printer spewing out endless reams of this seemingly random information, only adds to the apparent meaninglessness of the data. Its last stop is where it becomes a physical amount of paper, falling down to a heap on the floor.

And a representation in volume. Water Measure takes the idealization that is the mailing list and asks us – how do we value ourselves (or things)? How can we be valued? We are all products – productive value, potential earnings. As a member of a mailing list, we inhabit a certain demographic the mailing list represents in its totality, it is a generalization of the included members. Self-selecting or spam-trawled, we can then think of ourselves as part of this list in a certain way, and we are thought by the list owners in a certain way.

The artwork, from its origins in a mailing list specifically designed around and tailored to a certain group (global artists, arts organizations, galleries, collectors), omits the specificity of the list and reverts into a great mass. This lumpen group, stripped of meanings apart from its new meaning as an element of the work, takes meanings away and adds new ones based on a new context – taking a volume and stripping it back, ignoring many of its features, innate or assumed, concentrating on those which interest you at that moment, for the particular point that you wish to make.

The work figuratively funnels meaning in and out again. Every drop represents a person from that list, as the water drains away from the container, falling into the measuring jar below where it transmutes from drop to an implied person for a moment during its fall, reverting to drops which add up to an amalgam measured in the jar. Drops = amounts = people, people simply as amounts, divorced from their identity and meanings, except insofar as they satisfy the parameters of the list and add up to fill a volume. The illustration shows the water splashed around the jar – lost drops, lost people, unmeasured/measured then forgotten, soaking and evaporating away to become part of some other system in which they can be measured again. Never completely lost, but losing value in themselves to this particular system: this is the truth of “data”.

Cloud.data is the movement from computer-generated into real installation and imagined reality. The CGI showing on the arrangement of displays uses an advanced algorithm for simulating clouds – data can be manipulated to be a representation of things and/or reality, in this case dependant on the algorithm used. The simulation is reinforced by the installation, on the screens suspended overhead, over trays of water below, creating a simulated landscape of data-becoming-representation.

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Raw data is understood as a basic “atomic” building block on which things are built up. But data has a strange relationship with other things, the things it is part of, its relationship between part and whole, producing a loss of meaning, and a wastage of meaning.

When data, or the structures data produces, come into contact with reality there is a mismatch and wastage which occurs physically, as with the water in Water Measure, or the paper in GFWList. The material used to embody the ideas as expressed by data cannot keep up with the extent of the idea. Up against a finite materiality, ideas overflow. Hence concepts of wastefulness come in, and ideas of ethics form around this wastage – potentially endless wastage, potentially infinite. This is where imagination has the upper hand in resolving these problems in the movement from data to reality, or where it can hold the two irresolvable, sans wastage. But in a reverse movement, in the way in which we are aware of physical wastage, perhaps data needs to be thought of as precious in and of itself – each Bit is important and should be used economically and without waste in relation with the imagination, something which has been ignored in our terabytes of capacity.

So where is the imaginative subject in all of this? In any given situation that I address myself to, I am the subject in a number of senses. I am “subject-ed” by the artwork, but I also “subject” myself by my understanding of my place in relation to the work. It’s tempting to think of the subject as sitting outside of all the data-wrangling activities in the pieces, aloof and untainted, but they are right in the action of the formation of meaning. They sit at the point where meaning is produced, a separate activity to the data production and manipulation. They manage the wastage of this movement from data to reality. For instance in the work Anti-cybernetic (the piece which negates the title of the show) one meaning of which could be a going against of the “control functions, and the systems designed to replace them” as the definition of Cybernetics. In this piece we have “Anti-“ control, or the removal of control, or control which obviates itself. A switch which switches itself off, a self-destructive impulse, an act that removes itself, cause and effect facing off against one another, a meaning which is the removal of meaning.

aaajiao looks to the technocratic-utopian level of meaning which trusts in technology as some kind of redeemer of meaning, but he is also quite aware of the potential meaninglessness or arbitrariness of meaning in itself – the drips which splash out from their measuring container, the change of state in a computer chip. Meaning seems not to be in the “meanings” themselves, but in their movement from one form to another, from one person to another, this transference. As Turritopsis nutricula embodies immortality in its ability to form and reform, so aaajiao’s art works with the process of the formation of meanings to highlight the mutability not just of meanings, but of the concept of meaning itself.

Edward Sanderson, August 2010

Last year DICA was showing a selection of artists’ videos on the screens attached to the donkey, but this time around Michael Yuen and Yam Lau have created custom-built shelves for the cart which display a library of artists books.

After being moved on by the police from their original spot, DICA ended up on the corner of Fangyuan Xilu 芳园西路 and Jiangtai Lu 将台路 near the Lido Hotel, a busy intersection. There was a good turnout of locals on their way home from work and art-people, and many people took the time find out what was going on and thumb through the books:

As an artist is it possible to hold your subjects apart from their ideology, to present their close-at-hand concerns, to present the people around you and their lives as they take place outside of larger systems? Chinese artist Zheng Yunhan works with subjects embedded in the cult of ideology, working to avoid being caught up by it in his presentations.

Download PDF (152Kb)

The dilemma I have in launching this piece of writing into the public is that I am coming with an inherent bias towards Yunhan’s work – I am his dealer after all, so perhaps you need to take that into account when you read it. However, I believe this piece is not trying to boost his works without good cause, I really believe that if there wasn’t something interesting about Yunhan’s work, something with which I could grapple in words, to try to understand (and which I thought was worthwhile trying to understand), then I don’t think I would bother putting the effort into writing 5000 words about him. Of course, you could just say “well, it’s my job to promote my artists,” but I hope that my genuine interest and enthusiasm for his work (and, yes, the issues I have with it) come through in this piece.

Right now, the text is being hosted by Li Zhenhua’s research platform Laboratory Art Beijing and I’d like to thank them for supporting of my work in this way. I’m also in the process of editing the piece down into a more pithy 1,500 words which I’ll post to this blog in due course.

Link to text.

walks without walls or works

works without walls or walks

[ASIDE: I don't want to always seem like I'm complaining about things and especially not about Laoban, I had a great time and Jon did a great job and I fully support what he's doing. I think in every positive I see the potential for improvement, and I also want to understand what it is that I am finding so good, I guess so I can find more of the same. So, I can be quite critical of things, as I have high expectations.]

There were some very talented performers and artists working at the event, producing stunning visuals and sounds, and I can happily admit that I loved it – I was thoroughly engaged in it.

But at times my self-awareness came back and I was left wondering: what is the point of all this, what possible purpose does it serve apart from instant gratification? There was a hermeticism about it all, cut off inside that room from reality, and that began to worry me.

Looking back, the only artist who directly addressed some audience or source outside of the small group, some kind of larger society, with a hope perhaps of making some kind of comment, was Du Qin (a.k.a. D4Q1N), specifically generating a flying array of what I think was the current RMB to USD exchange rate as part of his projection – at any point in time a quite meaningful piece of information for society.

Du Qin at the Laoban Mixing Event, CPU:798. 12/2008.

Many of the other visuals that I saw were semi- or fully-abstract patterns, which—while distracting and by and large visually appealing—seemed to serve only to distract, not to engage. In most cases the visuals were feeding off the music and vice versa, producing what amounted to a closed loop, again not entering into an engagement with an audience either within the room or beyond.

[ASIDE: Of course, there may have been meanings which were lost on me. I may have missed them, but also the nature of symbolism is much more deeply ingrained in China than in Britain (from where I got most of my visual knowledge), so the significance of some imagery may have been meaningless to me.]

Nevertheless, the disjunction between my enjoyment of the sounds and visions, and my disquiet over the lack of engagement, can be rationalised by understanding the evening itself as the engagement. The possibility of the evening happening and what it represents is the socially important thing, both looking inward to the participants and outward to the rest of the world.

I should probably learn from the Adorno quotation which I posted a while ago, about ‘commitment’ in art. He says: “It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” Looking further back in my posted quotes there is the Marxist Art Historian Meyer Shapiro presenting abstraction in art, for all it’s seeming lack of subject, and hence effectiveness, nevertheless is the “domain of culture in which contradiction between the professed ideals and the actuality [of our culture] is most obvious and often becomes tragic.” In a similar way, I think, the abstraction of Laoban’s participants, itself against the norms, presents an alternative which energises society purely by its presence in the system.

I would go further, though, and give more credit to the event itself as a process which creates some change, some difference. At the end of the day the event can only (re)present what the individuals are doing at any given moment. If no one is engaging through their work, then engagement will not appear. But the evening itself can serve as an engagement. By moving the means of engagement onto the level of the container, this perhaps avoids a situation where participants feel pressured to conform to a particular mode of display, one which has a rather bad reputation for histrionics.

It’s true that there are many ways to make a statement, and being part of something which makes a statement—even if you yourself don’t make one—is perhaps enough, and important. You are guilty by association, as it were.

It was a good night overall, I had a great time (even though I had to keep reminding myself that I was there to look after the space, and not to enjoy myself). Many people came and seemed to respond well to the performers. As you can see from the video above and the photographs there were some very good sounds and visuals. My thanks go to Jon for organising so much at such short notice, with the help of Matt and Lu, and all their friends who pitched in to help out. I think this shows that an exciting idea can get people energised, even on such a cold night.

Looking ahead, I hope there will more variety in the material in future events, last night was very focused on DJs and VJs. Films and short talks were promised, which would have given more of a conceptual structure to the proceedings and will help prevent it becoming just another club night.

I hope, too, that more women will present their work. Last night the performers were without exception all men – it seemed to be the cliché of boys with their toys (I don’t know maybe this is perhaps a feature of the scene rather than a bug, as they say to excuse some oddity in software). I can’t believe there are no women making material and this would make a valuable contribution to the event.

But this was the first version of the event, and was very much about investigating a format for the future, so I want to see how it develops. The original spec for the night I thought was very exciting and something which had the potential for development into something very strong – and this was one of the reasons why I agreed to go with it. I hope that more of what was originally announced becomes incorporated into future events, as they have the possibility to a) bring together some of the creative communities here in Beijing and China in general which hover round each other but which don’t really get to cross-fertilise so often, and b) make links out from the local to the international creative scenes which all have their representatives here in BJ.

Laoban Soundsystem 1.0 Holiday Mixing Event at CPU:798

Friday, December 12, 8 PM – 12 Midnight, Free and Open to the Public

We invite all to come out to the launch of version 1.0 of the Laoban Soundsystem for a special Holiday Mixing Event at CPU:798. This is a new type of media event where all are welcome to join, bring media, laptops, video players, cameras, and other recording devices. The goal is to mix media, explore what artists, DJs, musicians, designers, and architects are working on RIGHT NOW — successes, failures, and rough edges are welcome at Laoban events! The ultimate plan is for consumers to be producers by both mixing media, and by tagging any recordings they have with “laoban” when posting onto twitter.com, flickr.com, or other places.

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How was digging up all the roads in 798 at the same time, ever possibly considered a good idea?

It seems that nowhere is safe from the ‘dream’ that is the Olympics. 798 is currently undergoing massive roadworks which seem to be for the installation of a new streetlighting system. This is A Very Good Thing, as after dark 798 was pitch black once you got 5 feet away from a main road. The authorities have decided use this as an opportunity to install new conduits for cables along every street.

I’m beginning to think it’s just as well our new gallery space is currently undergoing renovation and thus closed, because I would be worried about our visitors’ safety (and my own safety) if they were to attempt to locate the gallery. For your viewing pleasure, I hereby present a ‘before’ and ‘after’ shot of the road we are on:

Before

After