倫敦 london – 英属哥伦比亚省列治民市 richmond, british columbia
dearest,
that’s heavy. hope that it is not a reflection of your current state.
is it?
but i discovered this today, which whether or not you like the music, you may begin to love simply by the way it is described:
Talked to you on the phone the other day——WhatsApp voice call——and I noticed the dissecting and unsettling silence fading in between each spoken word, like someone holding the breath or stopping time. Or a tap closed between each filling of a glass. It was a clean, cleansed, silence; one purified by the dullness of calculation, of automation, of regulation and optimisation.
I remember the feeling of talking with friends via landline connection——it felt like a direct channel opened up between our ears and tongues, an airiness of circulation. I could hear the other person breathing and the slight static noise of electricity hardwiring us. Now I don’t hear the other person’s breath anymore——the algorithmic sound detection for controlling the threshold of the microphone transmission seems to not register breath as a signal deemed necessary for communication.
…
日惹 yogjakarta – 墨西哥城 mexico city
wonder if you remember that we had said we would go on holiday together last year.
wonder how you and your child are doing.
wonder if you remember that i had wanted to make strange models for your movie.
wonder if you remember that i haven’t written back to your e-mail.
can a contemporary condition become one’s psychological impairment, the wonderous thing, like her blank auto-replies, or trying to imitate the words of a great master:
⋯⋯很想对着那些无忧无虑的娇花倩草哭上一场。可她的眼泪已经被巨大的悲哀征服了，她这才明白绝望者是没有泪水的。
⋯⋯All she wanted to do was cry into those graceful and carefree petals, into the beautiful grass, but any tears in her had already been conquered by tremendous sorrow, and she finally understood why those in utter despair shed no tears.
— 遲子建 CHI Zijian，“亲亲土豆 Potato Kisses”
Posted by 丫 | reply »但願您也在這裡 （finding greetings series no. 2）
布拉格 prague – 舊金山 san francisco
kostel sv. mikuláše na starém městě (the church of St. Nicholas on the Old Town)
i wanted to be everywhere, all the time. but somehow time stumbled, fell down, and we were led to change genres because nobody took us seriously. or was it simply taking the time to get back to roots, ironic after that white dude’s patronising joke thirteen years ago (so you came to China to find your roots, eh?), me and my roots, everywhere, all the time. keeping it real is just something really really difficult, you know.
you know, just letting you know, you’ll be an arrival point because there’s a one-way love letter at stake, like determined roots and you, the water between my fingers.
重慶 chongqing – 星加坡 singapore
a hearty welcome: a massive dish showcasing Chongqing’s sprawling high-rises greets visitors at the opening of the Hotpot Cuisine Culture Festival yesterday. The pot——a reflection of Chinese people’s culinary passion——is divided into two, with half containing light-flavoured broth and the other half, a spicy variation. Models of skyscrapers sit in the middle. The municipality is widely regarded as the origin of hotpot.
紐約 new york – 紐約 new york
i started to realise the meaning of repetition. maybe because i was once a teacher, and that’s what one does in school, spinning drills, tires as hips. an exercise machine for getting old and being afraid of being forgotten.
you weren’t so didactic, but romantic still loops. we won’t call it like that because you wanted agency, 醒了 and 行了 again and again, aware of pretentions, but what recourse is there? you make your bed.
i make it again and again. and realise that actually that arendt bit is about systems, too. about the ecology of ‘it’s hard to be a good person’, being holistically compromised. about the distance between a sender and a receiver, about the logistical operations of the greatest love poets——”close to cynicism the way comedians are close to sadness”.
you realise、 you rise、 醒了 (a doubt about wokeness)、 行了.
notes for the academy of failure, 25-27 May 2018 and a slew of logos to support
“Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable source for political autonomy.”
- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999)
it’s an easy preemptive manoeuvre, maybe as a way of saving face, because we have been so institutionalised that consciousness becomes a way of negating the negation. “let me tell you i’m a loser, let me tell you before you find out for yourself, and you can never get me.” what does it mean to precede and gestate one another?
if preceding was a manner of not being defeated by you (insertion of Super Mario anecdote here), gestation was a stalling grammar of potentiality, latent and shadowy, unbecoming. but how do we unbecome one another, with one another?
he says “欠” appears only when ego exists, but really i didn’t mind feeling indebted to you. the hat was out, and i wanted to ask you a favour because i knew you could ask me any time, even if you didn’t. i wanted you to know that i owe you a lifetime. that was my way of staying connected to you. it was only a pity that after i thanked you for that one, you simply left, without a thought in your mind. i was hurt and angry, i am hurt and angry …because i thought you owed me an apology? fuck!
we’re back to the peculiarities of voice, i guess (play with the pronouns)
“S. loved the paintings, but as she was praising them, she knew they didn’t stand much of a chance in the art world. If R. made the same work but was twenty years younger, had different friends and used different words to describe them, they would be viable.”
- Chris Kraus, Absolute Love (2016)
images above from notes initially taken to prepare for a talk given at the Collaborative Studies Program (CSP), organised by the Asian Culture Research Institute (formerly known as Asian Culture Information Agency in Asian Cultural Complex), Gwangju, South Korea, August 2014. This overloading of prepositions recontextualises a later refabrication of the notes into jpeg images called “(An) Open (and) Failure”, part of Squatting Knowledges: Failure/s in a constellation and as a tribunal, curated by DiscLab Research and Criticism (November 2014 until an unknown date when the site was removed from the world wide web for reasons not known)
－－－
何穎雅 Elaine W. Ho will be an adjunct lecturer at the Academy of Failure: Pedagogies for the Unsuccessful, 25-27 May 2018 in Beijing, PRC.
where we used to say words to one another
opportuning: “love is excuse 4 exhibition”、two salons later、後她的後 post the post、inventories pending、雪上加霜 adding insult to、work on work、最爛的編輯 the worst editor、女 woman、that 18:21 song、his 8 year-old golden age、responsibility for fetish、怎麼互相扶持 how do we support one another、怎麼說「nurture」、剝削朋友 exploiting friends、the gathering of failed proposals as a form of depth、schwag politics、不要在我面前說「效率」這個詞、北京徵集 open call to beijing、”it’s complex [emoticon] and rather not over wechat”、。。。
Posted by 丫 | reply »After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
the .3 percent
he said, “our progress is not inevitable“.
Posted by 丫 | reply »gnomic notes on a dialogue
before and after the mooon, a process of reading and writing
about one month ago, these knives killed the photocopy machine. i was unsettled where they ignored and just kept on working. and then just a few days ago, the moon sliced my computer in two. in all of these aftermaths, yes——”keep working”, they said. though i was thinking of you.
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fashionista
sports babble
your doctorate
irene
she was this close to you
like divination
generating,
the one who lost interest
please come over
inadvertent soundtracks for inversion eyes
put your inversion eyes back on, proximity as the coming towards of embodiment, she says “the politics of location”. speaking as:
Ivo Kohler and Theodor Erismann, 1950
playlist:
__”Computer Eyes”, Jakob Boeskov/Timothy DeWit/Matthew Morandi, from The Wire Tapper 34
__”Golden Hours”, Brian Eno, from the album Another Green World
__”Pure”, Blackbird Blackbird, from the album Summer Heart
__”Tigers”, Christy & Emily
__”Talking History”, Xiao Hong & Xiao Xiao Hong, from the Dada Damage Compilation
__”Sullen Ground”, Mount Kimbie, from the album Cold Spring Fault Less Youth
__”Went Missing”, Nils Frahm, from the album Spaces
__”What Time is Love”, The KLF
__”Token Eastern Song”, Nirvana, from disc 4 of The Chosen Rejects: Live Rarities
__”Little Dreamer”, Future Islands, from the album Wave Like Home
__”Wait For Me”, 張曼玉 Maggie Cheung, from the Clean original soundtrack
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