- I would like to thank my two anonymous referees for their generous, helpful, and detailed feedback on an earlier version of this article.
- Books on China as a new world power will no doubt continue to proliferate exponentially. See, inter alia, Michael Dillon, Contemporary China: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2009); Czesław Tubilewicz, Ed., Critical Issues in Contemporary China (New York: Routledge, 2006); the mammoth Ian Jeffries, Political Developments in Contemporary China (New York: Routledge, 2011); W. John Hoffman and Michael J. Enright, eds., China into the Future: Making Sense of the World's Most Dynamic Economy (Singapore: John Wiley and Sons, 2008); Doug Guthrie, China and Globalization: The Social, Economic and Political Transformation of Chinese Society, revised edition (New York: Routledge, 2009). If there is any single message to gain from such books, it's that there is no single message to get from these books. After all, what can one propose about a country as large, complex, and contradictory as China? The specificities of current Chinese ‘control society’ are important: the extreme attentiveness of the current rulers to ideological issues coupled with a real commitment to control of ideological capital, à la the censorship of mass media and the Internet, the willingness to intervene internationally in symbolic positions (e.g., the arrest of the artist Ai Weiwei for alleged ‘economic’ and ‘sexual’ crimes, the recent boycott of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, the opportunistic establishment of a ‘rival’ prize, the extraordinary control over the Internet, the 1999 banning of the Falun Gong as an ‘evil cult’, the persistent representation of human-rights issues as just another ruse of Western imperialism, etc.). As Dillon notes in his preface to Contemporary China, ‘Today's China of reform—the land of concrete, glass and steel and bizarre youth cultures and extraordinary contemporary art—is still the same China as that of Mao Zedong and the Red Guards’, viiii. Or, as Tubilewicz notes in the introduction to his edited collection, ‘the contributors to this volume consider the rising economic inequalities—intra-urban, intra-rural, intra-regional, and interregional—as the main source of the increasing discontent among the Chinese citizenry’, 6. It is, however, perhaps too easy to invoke such issues, as if ‘Western’ states such as the US, had no such comparable ideological investments or political agendas regarding extra-judicial and extra-territorial executions, the use of torture, etc.
- The research on this topic being enormous, the encyclopaedic locus classicus remains Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), which lists the key characteristics of our new informational paradigm: 1) information is the primary raw material; 2) pervasiveness of effects of new technologies; 3) networking logic of system using these technologies (adaptable to unpredictable events and complexity); 4) unprecedented flexibility; 5) growing convergence of specific technologies into a highly integrated system. Most importantly, it highlights that ‘A global economy is something different [from a world economy]: it is an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale’, 92 (original emphasis). Moreover, as Zygmunt Bauman writes, ‘The new freedom of capital is reminiscent of that of the absentee landlords of yore, notorious for their much resented neglect of the needs of the populations which fed them. In contradistinction to the absentee landlords of early modern times, the late-modern capitalists and land-brokers, thanks to the new mobility of their by now liquid resources, do not face limits sufficiently real—solid, tough, resistant—to enforce compliance’, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 10–1.
- Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), 41–2. A countervailing account is given by Anthony Gardner's ‘Spectres after Marx: Contemporary Art's Contiguous Histories’, which begins by announcing its ‘scepticism about a core prospect for a “twenty-first-century art history”’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 10, no. 1, 2010: 201–12. My personal opinion is that the tension between ‘deterritorialisation’ (i.e., implying there is no possible art history of the future that is not irremediably compromised by a constitutive inability to attend to imperceptibles) and ‘reterritorialisation’ (i.e., implying that state-machines of one kind or another will invariably essay to hierarchise and represent what's ‘important’ in ‘art’) is, a) absolute and irreducible and, b) itself undergoing unprecedented transmogrifications.
- Paolo Virno, ‘Natural-Historical Diagrams: The “New Global” Movement and the Biological Invariant’, in The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, ed. Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano (Melbourne: re. press, 2009), 131.
- The terms ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘chronotope’ come from the Russian literary historian Mikhail Bakhtin. Heteroglossia, which attempts to isolate the key powers of novelistic prose, designates the irreducibly reflexive, parodic, dialogic, and transgeneric aspects of the novel, which puts to work all prior genres without any predetermined principle of connection. By contrast, chronotope (literally ‘timespace’) designates the inseparability of space and time in works of art and literature. Strikingly, these concepts themselves explicitly inject difference into art at the most basic level, that is, art is already other to itself in order to be art, and it must accomplish this in a further paradoxical fashion by singularising what it presents in order to generate more universal claims. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
- For a substantial anthology of a variety of theoretical accounts on ‘the virtual’, see Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro, eds., Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2006).
- James Newman, Playing with Videogames (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 83.
- For an introduction to SecondLife, see the corporation's own information videos at http://secondlife.com/whatis/?lang=en-US. The already enormous amount of literature on virtual worlds is expanding exponentially. For a shortlist of materials particularly relevant to the present essay, see Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Celia Pearce and Artemesia, Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); T.L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
- In fact, this situation was already noted by Martin Heidegger with respect to television. In the lecture translated as ‘The Thing’ (1950), Heidegger speaks with extraordinary perspicacity of the experiential consequences of the emergence of television: ‘All distances in time and space are shrinking… He now receives instant information, by radio, of events which he formerly learned about only years later, if at all. The germination and growth of plants, which remained hidden throughout the seasons, is now exhibited publicly in a minute, on film. Distant sites of the most ancient cultures are shown on film as if they stood this very moment amidst today's street traffic. Moreover, the film attests to what it shows by presenting also the camera and its operators at work. The peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication. Man puts the longest distances behind him in the shortest time. He puts the greatest distances behind himself and thus puts everything before himself at the shortest range. Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance… Short distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance remoteness.’ Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 165.
- In Justin Clemens, ‘We're All Globile Now’, The Monthly, July 2006, 56–8.
- The transformations effected upon the structure and function of consumption by new media have been serious enough to inspire academics to neologisms. In his recent book, Graeme Turner footnotes the term ‘prosumer’ (as well as invoking other neologisms such as ‘produser’ and ‘celetoid’) while examining possible shifts in the visibility and contributions of ‘ordinary people’ under conditions of the new media. Turner is also interested in tracking how new-media interactivity undermines the ‘familiar’ cultural-studies binary between ‘complicit passivity’ and ‘subversive participation’. Graeme Turner, Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn (London: Sage, 2010), esp. chapter 5.
- See Robert Pfaller, ‘Where Is Your Hamster?’ in Traversing the Fantasy, ed. Geoff Boucher, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 105–24; for example, ‘to counter-balance the sometimes detrimental predominance of the notion of “interactivity” in art theory, a discussion about “interpassivity” could be developed from this example. Here, the example was that of an artwork that already contained its entire reception; and it could be noted that there were observers who wanted artworks to be like this—they did not at all want to engage interactively, but preferred to take their opportunity to even delegate their so-called “passivity” of reception to the artwork’, 113 (original emphasis). One can say this about ‘interactivity’, then: that it is the simulation of activity whose limits and import are always-already established in advance, such that it is indistinguishable from actually not-being-there-yourself at all, and that this not-being-there-yourself is part of the paradoxical being-thereness of the (non)experience.
- See Justin Clemens and Adam Nash, ‘Seven Theses on the Concept of Post-convergence’, www.acva.net.au/blog/detail/seven_theses_on_the_concept_of_post-convergence.
- Tom Chatfield, Fun Inc.: Why Gaming Will Dominate the Twenty-first Century (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010), 5.
- See Wendy Chun's Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), in which she shows how new media precisely reconfigure the sets of possible relationships between ‘control’ and ‘freedom’.
- For a recent account of the cultural prehistory of new media, locating the emergence of modern kinds of virtuality in European romanticism, see Peter Otto's Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Other suggestive accounts include Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (see fn7), and Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002). Prefiguring Cyberculture is particularly interesting, providing a number of statements by new-media artists, including Stelarc, Troy Innocent, and VNS Matrix.
- This has massive implications for ‘real-world’ spaces themselves, as every study shows. See Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel M. Sutko, eds., Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).
- See Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005).
- Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham, 2008), 5.
- Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself, revised edition (Melbourne: Scribe, 2010), xvi.
- On the ‘new materialism,’ see Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
- ‘Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.’ William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 67.
- Tom Apperley, cited in Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Film Sequels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 75.
- Celia Pearce and Artemesia, Communities of Play, 280.
- Adam Nash, personal communication with the author, 16 April 2008. There are extraordinary implications for such online gaming economies. In 2011, it was reported that ‘scores of prisoners [were] forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money’. Danny Vincent, ‘China Used Prisoners in Lucrative Internet Gaming Work’, Guardian, 25 May 2011. In 2008, the trade in such credits in China alone was estimated at £1.2 billion.
- Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 85.
- Mark Stephen Meadows, I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life (Berkeley: New Riders, 2008), 13.
- See Darlene J. Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).
- Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 130.
- Cao Fei, i.Mirror ‘Part 2', www.youtube.com/user/ChinaTracy#p/a/u/1/jD8yZhMWkw0.
- Cao Fei, ‘Avatars’, Art: 21, http://blog.art21.org/2010/01/08/cao-fei-avatars/.
- Cao Fei, i.Mirror ‘Part 3', www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB-ILJlnWEE&feature=related.
- For further information, see RMB City's official website, http://rmbcity.com/.
- See James Au's report of the event on his well-known SL blog, New World Notes, http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2010/06/live-nude-avatars.html#more. Au was one of the judges for Naked Idol.
- In its modern signification—which bears on the relation between word and image in a generalised semiology—ekphrasis is, by definition, a mediated representation, and moreover, doubly mediated. First, it's mediated because it doesn't simply represent reality, but an already-represented reality. In the locus classicus of Achilles's shield described in Homer's Iliad, what is said to be represented upon the shield is already a picture, an image. Second, it's further mediated because it describes how another form or another medium has described reality. This double mediation of ekphrasis means that the reality it describes is never a raw reality (i.e., of nature or the physical world), but a reality that has itself been explicitly removed from nature in form and content. This means that ekphrasis is a self-reflexive sub-genre, in some way about the different ways in which different kinds of representations ‘represent’. A far more ancient signification of ekphrasis was that of vivid description, bringing to an audience's perceptions a scene at which they had not been present, with as strong an affect as possible. I want to claim that both modern and ancient senses of ekphrasis are at play in Cao Fei's digital works. For substantial scholarly accounts of the history of this trope, see Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Volume 11, 2011 - Issue 1: Art and Entertainment