all photos by 曲一箴 Twist QU*

If we had not been able to come closer to an understanding of affect at the reading club meeting, it came to me again in a recent text by another Brian (“The half-life of disaster“), where somehow the descriptive traversing of scales felt familiar, and of course it can hit us with as much impact as watching a slow-motion montage of the year in review, or Olympic triumphs, or yes, the touching moments and heroes of disaster. We should be immune already perhaps, cynical viewers whose forms of belief have decayed parallel to these half-lives, and yet even at standstill, reduced to its barest linguistic denominators, it could still be possible to induce a notion of affective scales on a billboard covering an urban construction site: “Grandpa lazing in the sun. Boys dancing hip-hop. Businessman checking e-mail. Woman carrying shopping bag.” She was kind of pissed off about this, about all that it left out or pinned down too characteristically in succinct world view, but it seemed also something more than ‘trace’ in a collective reading on media. This is an affect of the kind that Michael mentions, “understood as the embodiment of certain codes, to be read and embodied by a particular community”. Such embodiment is a continuous training, like watching these disasters in constant cycle, like urbanity itself. We learn to traverse the levels, moving from horror and shock at grand scale to human warmth and its accompaniments in the everyday heroes and miniature miracles that soothe a constant, half-toned fear.

Taking distance can occur in both directions, towards macro-scale world views or into the safety of the small moments in a day to day. What Massumi claims as a ‘trace-form anticipation’ singularly and collectively describes this back and forth motion; it is a kind of subjective being-in-motion that typifies our here and now condition. To make a hero of our friend A W W abroad stresses the silence nearby, it casts scales of individual activism helplessly against nameless foreboding forces at the state realm, naïvely paralleled by his name being coded “Love the future”. Larger and stronger pursuits of activism in the last years (in education, in the art world, the Middle East, the mid-West…) echo, or are symptomatic of such “affective conversion circuits”, but there remains to be seen what “alter-” could possibly step out of it. Should affect move out of affect? What lies outside of scale itself? The movements seem to encompass everything already, like fantastic ideas kept to oneself, like capitalism’s neverending ever in sight, like half-lives in decay.

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* there was a thought at the beginning of writing this post that these photos bore some relation to the things i was going to say, but the distancing ended up there. there is a lot of ambivalent feeling in their transmission, but they speak of a relation…

在每一捆冥币完美的，脆新的，多彩的封皮下面隐藏着一些劣质的，粗糙印刷的冥币，这些下面的冥币的纸张也是不同的，由便宜的木浆和再生纸等劣质材料构成。观察这些冥币的背面，我们在混杂的物质间发现冥冥中的声音片断回应了我们。 看看下面的信息：

Under the first perfect, crisp, colorful face-note of every package of hell money hides a less perfect, roughly printed group of bills representing the appearance of that initial simulation. Even the paper of these under-notes is different, composed of the bits of cheap pulp-wood and recycled papers derived from the lowest level of materials. Inspecting the backs of these cheaper bills, we discovered in the mash of substances the fragments of a reincarnated voice communicating back to us.  See the message below…

(more…)

“我回家的时候他站了在我们门口外面弹小号… When I came home he was playing outside of the door…”

我们初五在家里好好等着他，但没人来请我们吃饺子…月亮代表我的心！
On the fifth day of the new year we waited for him, but no one came over to invite us for dumplings… The moon represents my heart!

换一下招牌 a change of signs:

我们每年换一次…
We do it every year…

祝大家春节快乐！Wishing everyone a happy Spring Festival (get warmer, get warmer, get warmer)!

I recently ran into this mini project from students of FEI Jun‘s media lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (courtesy of NO+CH). They call them “micro-observations”, and according to the students, serve “not merely as a magnification of the thing itself, but as an enlargement of the act of noticing. ‘Micro-observations’ bring about not only a paying attention to the unnecessary, but in revisiting these objects the transformation of their semantic meaning.” Nice public intervention~

点击图片查看箭头指向的物体 Click on the images to see enlarged object

“微观”公共艺术项目

材料：水、粉笔、现成品

人们似乎只习惯关注宏观风景，而忽略身边的细微之物，尤其是在公共环境中。指向性的标识符号往往对人产生直觉性的吸引力，我们在公共空间中使用粉笔、水等创建了临时性的导视符号，用于指向日常环境中的一些微小的物件，墙角的昆虫躯体、地上干枯的残花、马路上散落的烟蒂…叠加的标识使得这些平常无奇的细节被人为的放大，其实被放大的不是物件本身，而是人们的关注，“微观”导致的不只是一次可有可无的关注，被关注的那些物这样的再访中被转化了语义。作为对于特定公共空间的一次微小和瞬间的干预，“微观”企图引发“再访－再现－再定义”的感知体验。

参与艺术家 Participating artists：费俊 FEI Jun、尚钰 SHANG Yu、宋思琪 SONG Siqi、张宝珠 ZHANG Baozhu

提醒大家在北京！ 还有13天跟北京市“提意见”！ Reminder for everyone in Beijing! Only 13 days left to “voice your opinions”!

above: a few notes on the sidelines from 吴以楠 Sunday, 欧阳 Xiao and me… To be non-anonymous in a country of billions sounds like implication, another cruising for a bruising. Cynicism reigns, who wants to speak?  中文公告: http://zhengwu.beijing.gov.cn/gzdt/gggs/t1134433.htm

last night：The“小保安 little bodyguard”is harmonized.
昨天晚上：小保安被HX了。
today：We harvest a lot of mushrooms, and the little bodyguard escapes from the wall!
今天：我们收获了好多蘑菇，之后小保安给熏跑了。

一大堆看客停下来关注一个人帮一个出租车司机从树上摘出租车的钥匙。在这个过程中马路上的一排车变得越来越长——都堵在没有钥匙的出租车后面。整个场面持续了差不多10分钟。拿到钥匙之后，一个凶狠的年轻小伙子试图挡住出租车，被“灭火者”拉走，最后的高潮是小伙子疯狂的追着出租车跑但最后还是没有追上。一切终于回到“正常”。神奇的中国!

The crowd gathers as an unknown man takes initiative to help a taxi driver get his car keys out of a tree. While this is happening, the line of cars grows steadily behind his cab, which is stopped in the middle of a single-lane street. The scene lasts for approximately 10 minutes, only returning to ‘normalcy’ after the climax of a fiercely angry young man trying to block the taxi driver from driving away and finally chasing him down the street. Glorious China!

我们今天开会之后，溜达到外面去仔细看野猫给我们留的“平面保安”。周围的人评价包括了“是你们弄的吗？”，“真吓人”，“什么意思？看不懂”以及“你听过苏打绿的歌吗?” 我们对着墙猜测它想表达的意义以及作者的目的。讨论最欢的是图像是否像曲哥。我们的“探讨”听起来很像美术馆里一些参观者的无知言论。看了这个“保安”的创造者讲了“艺术”与“行动主义”的分别，引发我们回到了一个老话题——行动主义是activism吗? 百度了一下，得到了两个回答：激进主义，行动主义。那激进导致action吗，thinking和doing的边界在哪？激进想法能存在吗？

After a morning meeting, we venture outside to take a good look at the traces left by a few rowdy rascals in the area. Commentary ranges from “Is this you guys’ doing?” to “It scared the shit out of me“, “What does that say? Not understandable” and “Have you heard Soda Green’s songs before?” Speculation about meaning, intention and whether or not the smiling figure looks like QU sound a lot like museum chatter, so it is perhaps not so irrelevant that the inside word has it to drop considerations of “art” and “activism”. Conversations meander, and a quick Baidu of activism（激进主义，行动主义） reactivates an ongoing discussion about thinking and doing. If 激进 (i thought it sounds more like ‘radical’) must also involve the act, does the 激进想法 (‘radical idea’?) exist on its own, and how close to 激进 could we be from the viewpoint of a cubicle of a well-intended NGO?

周五早上，我们在胡同里边溜边闲谈——就是这样，大家探讨一些无聊的事，也许不怎么懂，也有可能知道内幕。不时流露的独家信息和没有边际的话题让我们的对话从thinking到doing漫无目的地徘徊。最后，即兴的结果是我们的“小保安”突然长胡子了。是thinking吗? 或许doing?

Standing around and chatting in our hutong on a Friday morning looks kind of like this. Speculation on the state of affairs, not really understanding, maybe knowing the story behind the story. Tidbits of background knowledge and free association make a conversation wander aimlessly between a kind of doing and thinking, like the spontaneous outcropping of a goatee on our new bodyguard’s chin.