HERBAL URBANISM: BEITOU 3.
Urban Herbalism and Topography of Gods
Urban Herbalism and Topography of Gods
Curated by Manray HSU
The sky has eyes. The vertical city design has played a crucial role in recent human civilization. Not only did it sustain and redefine the connectivity of the 3D environment (Umwelt) in dealing with issues related to all aspects of life. It also worked with other heterogeneous designs in capturing the evolutionary symbiosis among the multifarious living beings. Divinity refers to more than one single monotheist God but extends to multiple deities residing in different lands and territories as well as the spirits of animism that permeate all objects. Gods define how we exist in this world whether in one mudanized world, one planet, or many worlds in infinite universes. Gods also designate who we belong to. The captured live at the mercy of the lenience and grace of the captors.
The advent of modernity heralded the designation of godhood and divinity in the private domain. For example, in Taiwan divinity falls into the territory of civil society rather than that of the state apparatus. In the disenchantment and secularization process that characterizes modernity, the hybrid worship of deities and animistic spirits saw vibrant development in modern society. From the early modernization of Western societies to newly industrialized regions, and further to the struggling borderline Global South, the coexistence of the hybrid deities and sprits is ubiquitous. In the meantime the performance of the deities, ranging from medicine, health, education, career planning, commerce, crafts to the governance of a state including security surveillance, worked in tandem with the disenchantment system. However, one must admit that such an alliance is nothing new but can be traced to the era of agricultural societies.
The imminent question is what are the characteristics that redefine the ecology of modern times from the perspective of a vertical city when borders, firewalls, the Internet, communication infrastructures, omnipresent surveillance cameras and hordes of drones crisscross the city? The eye of the sky is never going to vanish even when it loses its forensic power. It can perform other duties, such as intimidation, and disturbing psychological warfare. Using the trope of illness, security surveillance is unlike that of epidemic prevention. The task is to boost the city’s immune system not only in regards to law and order and public health but extending to all aspects of the city life. Advance prevention, early deployment, the inculcation of fear as well as early detection and extermination of pathogens on daily basis are some of the key measures. Technology is paramount in acquiring real-time images for instantaneous comparisons, eliminating human errors, as well as generating the big data for risk assessment and future projection. Personal identification and individual chronicle no longer matters: “statistical derivatives care not who we are, nor the self revealed by the relevant statistics. Imagination and speculation determine our identity, orientation and potentiality. “
Three projects are featured in Herbal Urbanism: Beitou, the Topography of the Deities. They seem worlds apart upon first glance, yet they all exhibit a post-humanism stance shared by many contemporary artists, in a “non-modernity” signs of the times. Huang Po-Chih’s video work records a psychotic kinsman in a residence playing pieces of piano work For Elise and A Maiden’s Prayer. The scene is in a bathroom, the last place that a burglar would find himself in, according to research. In the world of kleptomania, the bathroom is the least likely strategic location, given the limited amount of time and familiarity to the crime scene that the thief is afforded. As an observer of a singularized world, is the burglars’ modus operanti the only reference to the psychology of this performer? Or is it a mental state of paranoia that the controlling surveillance system inflicts on its city-dwellers, thus blurring the line between the monitored and the monitors? The overriding question becomes who is the professional stealer? Is it the artificial intelligence and the derivative statistics behind the big data or the vulnerable subjects who refuse to yield to the surveillance? It is also a reflection of the indeterminate role that a subject plays within a panopticon. Perhaps all the above are not the focal points. The primary focus is that Huang Po-Chih the artist in a portfolio of projects positions himself as an ecosophist who, in reference to his kinsman, relinquishes his role as a creator while residing with his unwitting subject in constant attempts to reconstruct a co-habiting kinship. Is such an ecosophist allowed to retain his status as a contemporary artist?
Melmel Chen, in “Mystic River: Some Debris and Poetry,” chooses to work with AI, using unatributable crude data as her medium to create mystic flows between the artist and the digital ecology. She does not object to processing the Digital images generated by the all pervasive closed-circuit cameras. On the contrary, she welcomes them as materials that belong to the universe and as part of the greater eco-system. She embraces the “Manifesto of Urbanibalism” proclaimed by Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli, the two Dutch artists. The above manifesto is in turn evolved out of the Brazilian anti-colonist polemist Oswald de Andrade’s (1890-1954) “Manifesto Antropofago.” Urbanibalism envisions an insatiable appetite that devours and consumes cities and environment as though the entire universe were one gargantuan metabolic system. Each particle and element interacts with the environment in endless absorption, production and regeneration. Internal metabolism is constantly involved in unceasing, encyclical, and reprocessing flows. In this temporal flux and flow cities grow organically like our body, with its bone structures and calcium, in an chronic, evolutionary timeframe. Reversing imperceptible, mineralizing time scale, Melmel Chen crunches, and regurgitates split-second AI data pool like a gigantic gastroenterological digestive system that eventually returns to the cosmic “Mystery Flows.”
“Warm Up the Landscape” by Peng Hung-Chih is informed by Daoist philosophy. It corresponds to the conceptualization of urbanibalism. The esoteric energy cultivating and internal alchemy practicing doctrines of Neijingtu is converted into flowing charts. Composed by unknown author, the text is consistent with the Daoist doctrine of anonymity epistemology. The practitioners of the alchemy derive their energy cultivating exercise based on their interpretations of the text and the diagrams provided by the book. The anatomical microcosm presented by Neijingtu correlates to multiple and multi-layered ecological circles, such as family prototypes, the knowledge of alchemy, rural life, rivers and constellations. The Daoist conception of the internal circulation of the vital organs corresponds to the phenomenon of the earth’s rotation. Landscape of flowing rivers and staunch mountains are likened to the circulation of veins and bone structures of the human anatomy as well as the rotation of the planets. Man, earth, and stars are forged in the same Daoist and cosmic caldron.
The advent of modernity heralded the designation of godhood and divinity in the private domain. For example, in Taiwan divinity falls into the territory of civil society rather than that of the state apparatus. In the disenchantment and secularization process that characterizes modernity, the hybrid worship of deities and animistic spirits saw vibrant development in modern society. From the early modernization of Western societies to newly industrialized regions, and further to the struggling borderline Global South, the coexistence of the hybrid deities and sprits is ubiquitous. In the meantime the performance of the deities, ranging from medicine, health, education, career planning, commerce, crafts to the governance of a state including security surveillance, worked in tandem with the disenchantment system. However, one must admit that such an alliance is nothing new but can be traced to the era of agricultural societies.
The imminent question is what are the characteristics that redefine the ecology of modern times from the perspective of a vertical city when borders, firewalls, the Internet, communication infrastructures, omnipresent surveillance cameras and hordes of drones crisscross the city? The eye of the sky is never going to vanish even when it loses its forensic power. It can perform other duties, such as intimidation, and disturbing psychological warfare. Using the trope of illness, security surveillance is unlike that of epidemic prevention. The task is to boost the city’s immune system not only in regards to law and order and public health but extending to all aspects of the city life. Advance prevention, early deployment, the inculcation of fear as well as early detection and extermination of pathogens on daily basis are some of the key measures. Technology is paramount in acquiring real-time images for instantaneous comparisons, eliminating human errors, as well as generating the big data for risk assessment and future projection. Personal identification and individual chronicle no longer matters: “statistical derivatives care not who we are, nor the self revealed by the relevant statistics. Imagination and speculation determine our identity, orientation and potentiality. “
Three projects are featured in Herbal Urbanism: Beitou, the Topography of the Deities. They seem worlds apart upon first glance, yet they all exhibit a post-humanism stance shared by many contemporary artists, in a “non-modernity” signs of the times. Huang Po-Chih’s video work records a psychotic kinsman in a residence playing pieces of piano work For Elise and A Maiden’s Prayer. The scene is in a bathroom, the last place that a burglar would find himself in, according to research. In the world of kleptomania, the bathroom is the least likely strategic location, given the limited amount of time and familiarity to the crime scene that the thief is afforded. As an observer of a singularized world, is the burglars’ modus operanti the only reference to the psychology of this performer? Or is it a mental state of paranoia that the controlling surveillance system inflicts on its city-dwellers, thus blurring the line between the monitored and the monitors? The overriding question becomes who is the professional stealer? Is it the artificial intelligence and the derivative statistics behind the big data or the vulnerable subjects who refuse to yield to the surveillance? It is also a reflection of the indeterminate role that a subject plays within a panopticon. Perhaps all the above are not the focal points. The primary focus is that Huang Po-Chih the artist in a portfolio of projects positions himself as an ecosophist who, in reference to his kinsman, relinquishes his role as a creator while residing with his unwitting subject in constant attempts to reconstruct a co-habiting kinship. Is such an ecosophist allowed to retain his status as a contemporary artist?
Melmel Chen, in “Mystic River: Some Debris and Poetry,” chooses to work with AI, using unatributable crude data as her medium to create mystic flows between the artist and the digital ecology. She does not object to processing the Digital images generated by the all pervasive closed-circuit cameras. On the contrary, she welcomes them as materials that belong to the universe and as part of the greater eco-system. She embraces the “Manifesto of Urbanibalism” proclaimed by Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli, the two Dutch artists. The above manifesto is in turn evolved out of the Brazilian anti-colonist polemist Oswald de Andrade’s (1890-1954) “Manifesto Antropofago.” Urbanibalism envisions an insatiable appetite that devours and consumes cities and environment as though the entire universe were one gargantuan metabolic system. Each particle and element interacts with the environment in endless absorption, production and regeneration. Internal metabolism is constantly involved in unceasing, encyclical, and reprocessing flows. In this temporal flux and flow cities grow organically like our body, with its bone structures and calcium, in an chronic, evolutionary timeframe. Reversing imperceptible, mineralizing time scale, Melmel Chen crunches, and regurgitates split-second AI data pool like a gigantic gastroenterological digestive system that eventually returns to the cosmic “Mystery Flows.”
“Warm Up the Landscape” by Peng Hung-Chih is informed by Daoist philosophy. It corresponds to the conceptualization of urbanibalism. The esoteric energy cultivating and internal alchemy practicing doctrines of Neijingtu is converted into flowing charts. Composed by unknown author, the text is consistent with the Daoist doctrine of anonymity epistemology. The practitioners of the alchemy derive their energy cultivating exercise based on their interpretations of the text and the diagrams provided by the book. The anatomical microcosm presented by Neijingtu correlates to multiple and multi-layered ecological circles, such as family prototypes, the knowledge of alchemy, rural life, rivers and constellations. The Daoist conception of the internal circulation of the vital organs corresponds to the phenomenon of the earth’s rotation. Landscape of flowing rivers and staunch mountains are likened to the circulation of veins and bone structures of the human anatomy as well as the rotation of the planets. Man, earth, and stars are forged in the same Daoist and cosmic caldron.
ARTIST
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Alright. Let’s enter from the back door, move the piano into the bathroom on the second floor, and play For Elise or A Virgin’s Prayer.
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Mystic River：some debris and a poet
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Warm up the Landscape
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