Rhizome Reflection:
Pete Jiadong Qiang is a multimedia artist based in the UK. He explores the intersection of culture, technology, and affection—with a particular interest in Chinese myth and folklore, science fiction, and fan fiction—through VR, 3D animation and painting, installation, game design, and architecture.
I chose to blog about PJQ because I was drawn to the mixed aesthetics and mixed conceptual influences of his work. I am excited by uncommon juxtapositions both aesthetically and theoretically. I see PJQ combining old art forms, like the science fiction world of a novel or a fan fiction or manga, with newer art forms, like virtual reality and 3D visualizations and virtual constructions. He sees potentials for collaborations of Daoist ideas and Chinese myths with “multi-fandom cosmotechnics” and notions of queer futurity. I clicked into a few interviews with similar themes of artists diving into ethnographic, artistic research on subcultures and drawing parallels to religion and lore from the deeper past of civilization. PJQ’s artwork and aesthetic most interested me out of all these comparable interviews. I liked that I saw children engaging with the work:
I appreciate when the ideas in an artist’s process and/or reflection feel rich with creativity, ingenuity, and fresh perspective, and I maintain that their work gains value when it appeals to people from different demographics at the immediate, surface level. Especially when the work is interactive, that it invites that interactivity feels important, though not necessary (still thinking on this). In that sense, I suppose PJQ’s work appeals to me both conceptually and aesthetically, and I like feeling connected to art on both of those levels, and I like when I feel those levels no longer as different levels but rather as integrated aspects of a piece that is felt as an overall experience. PJQ said something about curating an installation like how he prepares a three course meal. This approach resonates with me because food, and chefs, prioritize taste: experience.
The convergence of contemporary aesthetics and technology with ancient religious imagery feels like a faithful representation of life and the world today. We are deeply rooted in old mythologies and they still hold influence on how we see the world. These mythologies are now situated in a world of different aesthetics and possibilities and feelings of time and space and physics.
Grainy VHS aesthetic with handwritten scripture 3D animated into a video with game-esque cinematography (camera movement).
“I think it might be a matter of what I call queer tuning—a soft, passive way to seek healing regarding identity, gender, and sexuality without a conscious structure of resistance. Most mainland Chinese fandoms retain a young constituency without too many historical, cultural, political, and moral burdens. Just like how the sea receives all rivers flowing into it, the tuning of fandom expects and welcomes new cultural, technological and affective turns.”
“I find that fandom practices like modding (making user-determined enhancements), crossover (bridging characters from different fictional words), and shipping (desiring romantic connection between fictional characters) are imbued with radical, liberating potentials. They bring about connections that don’t yet exist, mixing genres and creating new ones.” (the interviewer said this one)
Questions for PJQ:
When looking into different fandoms, you said you avoid the ones that have been too heavily affected by politics and censorship. How do you feel the existence of such censorship affects fanfic culture, including these smaller posthumous fandoms? Do they feel untouched and separate from that politicized world or do they thrive in opposition to it/because of it?
You also speak of the “conscious structure of resistance” and describe a sort of passive form of resistance. This idea intrigues me because I often think of resistance with this hard, firm, or even forceful connotation, and you frame it in quite a different way. Do you think passive resistance is “native” to a specific culture or subculture and can you speak more about this phenomenon and how you observe it?
Recess Art
The artist I chose from Recess Art’s residency archive is the three-person collective called Institute For New Feeling, headed by Scott Andrew, Agnes Bolt, and Nina Sarnelle. They are a mysterious center for testing and creating new ways of feeling and ways of feeling new. In their own words: “Borrowing aesthetics and language from wellness and tech industries, market research, speculative design, political propaganda, we assume a familiar yet fragile voice of authority” (info page of their site).
I chose their project Seek, carried out in the spring of 2015, because it struck me as familiar. I believe my undergrad explorations in my project music_8.ball have crossover with Seek. Both hone in on randomness in technology as a means for clairvoyant readings. In Rebecca Worby’s write-up about Seek they say, “[s]cience may have debunked astrology, but new media has, in a way, revived it.” Like in PJQ’s art, Seek touches upon how we encounter spirituality in the age of new media. I imagine that engaging with this piece is fun, fulfilling, and mystifying for participants. I like how Seek admits and, further, embraces the divine-adjacent quality of the internet, so full of information and seemingly random in how it might communicate with people that it serves a semi religious or godlike purpose to us. Seek joins human and technospiritual in creative ways such as through “a series of questions that are fed into a Google search string to generate prophetic and enigmatic insights.”
If I could interact with the project I would be excited about receiving my clairvoyant reading, of course! I would like to observe how my interaction with the internet generates a random message that I then get to interpret, and I wonder how the process might subvert my control over interpretation or my tendency toward it.
IfNF’s other projects definitely intrigue me. I like how they appropriate pop and profit-driven aesthetics, speaking to us in a language we are familiar with and sort of numb to, but saying different things in ways that make me more aware of how we’re being communicated with as consumers. I’d like to explore more of their work when time permits.
IMPACT
I notice that the two artists/works I chose to focus on in my research shared a common theme of spirituality and appealing to long-standing human characteristics (Seek: desire towards religion and future-telling and PJQ: hyperreligiousness, hypergastronomicalness, and hypersexuality). I noted this in my curiosity syllabus, as it seems a theme I might want to delve into myself in a project at some point. I also had an idea for a sort of poetic acronym exercise while looking at a different Rhizome interview that mentioned UAS, unmanned aircraft systems, which made me think of USA—I think there is room to explore in this little link.
Leave a Reply