6th Guangzhou Triennial Towards Symbiotic Thinking
Under the artistic direction of Wang Shaoqiang, the 2018 Guangzhou Triennial, opening on December 21, explores the relationship between technology and ecology, machines and human as well as non-human life. Zhang Ga, co-curator with Angelique Spaninks and Philipp Ziegler, reveals this 6th edition of the exhibition, featuring works by 49 artists from 14 countries – Simon Denny, Harun Farocki, Pierre Huyghe, Lynn HershmanLeeson and Guan Xiao, among the others.
L’OFFICIEL ART: “As We May Think: Feedforward,” the 6th edition of the Guangzhou Triennial, borrows its title from a 1945 essay by American engineer Vannevar Bush, in which he envisioned the Memex – a hypothetical proto-hypertext system, precursor to the personal computer. What is the inspiration behind this Triennial?
ZHANG GA: The title of the Triennial elicits or solicits difficult questions. First of all, what has become today’s pervasively technological society is the result of certain radical thinking – as exemplified in Bush’s As We May Think – about knowledge production and information organization. This led to the explosion of technological advancement that has had far-reaching ramifications for societies of all sorts, in which the notions of work and play, politics and economics, or life as a whole, have undergone unprecedented transformation, alongside the acceleration of the Anthropocene, the Human Epoch, characterized by significant human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. If the ingenuity of human thought has produced irreversible changes in the environment and the biosphere, how humanity might continue to evolve and survive is therefore at the core of contention over whether technology is a menacing alienation or a saving grace. The core idea that underlies the Triennial is to advocate another pathway of thinking, a sort of symbiotic thinking that is able to overcome the dichotomy and tension between the humans and nonhumans, organic and inorganic, culture and nature, machine and flesh that has dominated the disciplinary and compartmental production of knowledge since the dawn of modernity. In this regard, we are developing a conceptual model of Memex to extend and preserve not just human memory, but also that of species and things of all kinds and orders.
As you just mentioned, digital infrastructures, non-human life and machines are some of the themes examined in the Triennial. How do the participating artists respond to these topics?
The recent debate on the ramifications of the Anthropocene gives rise to a new awakening of cultural consciousness based on non-human centered, ecological thinking, which is particularly evident in the media arts. Artists working with technologies tend to have an intuitive grasp of the current discussions on the symbiosis of co-existing entities, the new materialist mode of multiplicity and polyphony in the production of subjectivities. The experiential nature of media art facilitates the materialization of such intellectual leanings. Many works in this Triennial aptly reflect this emerging tendency. For example, there is Tomás Saraceno’s “sky machine” in the “Machines Are Not Alone” section of the Triennial. It flies high, free from borders, free from fossil fuels, hovering above the confines of humanity. Down on the ground there are plant machines that intelligently go about their functions of recuperation and repair, modulating pollution levels with their sensory agility and turning the wasteful into the plentiful. The vegetal machine created by Gilberto Esparza takes on a life of its own in its machine consciousness. This symbiotic robot made of a set of modular microbial fuel cells for the development of bacteria ensures that the machinic organism is self-sufficient.
This bilateral cycle optimizes the environmental balance of producer species and consumer species, maintaining homeostasis. Thomas Feuerstein creates an artificial Umwelt full of apparatus and flasks of various sizes, pumps and tubing, instruments that stir up bubbling fermentation in which bioreactors oscillate, enigmatic fluids pass and bacteria thrive, so that stone is made flesh, and geology becomes biology.
The “Machines Are Not Alone” section of the Triennial, which you have curated, is the third installment of an exhibition project begun at Chronus Art Center in Shanghai in the summer of 2018. Could you tell us more about the project and what shape it is going to take on in Guangzhou?
This goes back to an earlier invitation to curate the 6th Device Art Triennial at the Contemporary Art Museum in Zagreb, opening on December 18, three days prior to the Guangzhou Triennial. The curatorial inspiration initially had something to do with device and apparatus as a framework for the concept of the Device Art exhibition. I think this was a good starting point and allowed for gradual evolution into a much broader articulation of machines as systems of interdependence and reciprocity, a new metaphor of ecology. Having decided on the theme, I also thought about traveling exhibitions, each of which would root itself in the local milieu and create logistic, ecological and psychosocial interconnections with its immediate surroundings and Umwelt, as if it were a living act of the Three Ecologies. Each iteration is conceived with a different configuration of artists and works. The Chronus version focused mostly on the practice of young Chinese artists in their varied approaches to the machine theme. The show in Zagreb takes up the entire temporary exhibition space of the museum – about 1,500 square meters – and features more works by European artists. The Guangzhou Triennial, as the most extensive mounting of the machine show, includes many ambitious large-scale works with a roster of international artists, both established names whose works strike a particular resonance with the conceptual underpinning of the exhibition, and important media artists who nonetheless remain outside the limelight of the mainstream art world. It is a selection with a broad spectrum of works across generations. From, say, Thomas Bayrle who was born in 1937, to new faces fresh out of college.
“As We May Think: Feedforward,” 6th Guangzhou Triennial. Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou. December 21, 2018 – March 31, 2019.