Remind Me How A Bird Chirps?
By Hoe Su FernWe need an open system of incomplete urbanism which accepts conflict, chaos and complexity as well as welcomes new knowledge, cutting-edge innovation and unexpected progressive societal changes
William S. W. LimTracing Latencies is in an exhibitionary mode that responds to, and magnifies, that lack of uncomplicated perspicuity. To do so, it takes the concept of latency as a starting point. In computer networking and audio systems, latency is the measure of delay. It is often thought of as something to be fixed or overcome; as feedback that degrades professional quality. Interface optimizations are intentionally created to reduce these delays and feedback, especially in the name of efficiency and effectiveness.
However:
- Is latency always a bad thing?
- Should we always be chasing to reduce latency to achieve system optimization and efficiency?
- Should the future city always aim to be smart, and effective?
- What's missing and/or stays hidden?
- What and who is left behind in this chase to reduce latency?
- What is the feedback actually trying to tell us?
Drawing on this concept of latency as a starting point, Tracing Latencies is an attempt to momentarily gather and entangle a mixed array of artists, creative practices and multivarious voices across the physical and digital realms; so as to invite the audience to pause, contemplate, and (re)imagine the conditional ways we relate to our increasingly digitized urban environments as well as to each other. In particular, it aims to trace and unfold the politics of invisibility and illegibility in our seemingly smart cities, as well as to prompt one to embrace the displaced, the liminal, the incomplete and the unanticipated.
Each art installation within this group show is a discursive attempt to disclose and engage with the different conjunctures and possibilities of the historical present, with particular reference to the potentialities of art-making and creative practice in enabling future resilient cities. Being attentive to ruptures and discontinuities present in our increasingly digitized urban environment, each artist/collective/creative practitioner has employed differing gestures, strategies and lexicons to prompt the audience to think critically within the uncertainty of the interregnum, as well as to contemplate the precarity and violence present in our contemporary Anthropocene - from the diminishing of citizen rights and privacy, to greater disparity, dispossession, and the acceleration of climate change. together,
Overall, Tracing Latencies activates the physical and liminal sites at 136 Goethe Lab into a pulsating and ever-evolving environment.
Come by to pause and sit with us for a while, and get comfortable with tensions, fissures, in-betweeness and heterotopias.
Or drop by our website and linger momentarily, and trace the routes that the contributing artists and practitioners have taken to reach the problematized present.
Mostly, do come by and celebrate artmaking and creative practice as essential and dynamic gestures that not only illuminate what Salvoj Zizek calls, “morbid symptoms,” but also enable the reimagining of what kinds of futures might become sustainable.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters
Antonio GramsciThis set of short curatorial notes is inspired by the title of the mixtape by Evening Chants, which is a sound response to the exhibition. The mixtape can be found here .
