Responding to the Rockbund Art Museum's research direction of diasporic fiction, this month's program engages speculative practices as a far less rigid field. The AUUUUDITORIUM's July focus builds on from last month's lecture series that explored the bridging of scientific knowledge and radical literature through the early emergence of science fiction in China. This month's program, titled The Fantastical Carrier, is a cultural carrierbagfilled with tricks that embrace time out of joint through retrospection and speculation to avoid a linear, progressive technoscientific narrative. Three distinct yet interconnected events will take place in July as part of the AUUUUDITORIUM: a film screening, a live and DJ set performance, and a party event. The sound and moving image evening A Vessel Without Nothing emphasises fictionality that stirs away from scientific facts. The program considers the "othered" carriers: a slime mould, a spiritual medium, and a self-driving car.
As Sci-fi writer Nalo Hopkinson writes: "To be a person of colour writing science fiction is to be under suspicion of having internalized one's colonization." The problem in the field has never been the fiction, but the science. The sound and moving image evening A Vessel Without Nothing emphasises fictionality that stirs away from scientific facts. The program considers the "othered" carriers: a slime mould, a spiritual medium, and a self-driving car.
Magic Myxies (1931) shows the life-cycle of Myxies (myxomycetes) by Mary Field and Percy Smith. However, much of the scientific information in this jolly film is inaccurate: Myxomycetes are Eukaryotic organisms that are neither animals, plants or fungi. Instead, they are Protista, a kingdom of organisms that just means "other".
In Piña, Why is the Sky Blue? (2021), Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser consider how pre-colonial ways of being have survived into the present despite their ongoing violent oppression. By drawing on interviews with activists and healers in Ecuador and the Philippines, this sci-fi documentary tells the story of an AI spiritual medium known as Piña that can receive, collect and transmit inherited knowledge, messages, and dreams to people in order to secure their survival.
Located in an unspecified smart city in the near future, NOX, short for "Nonhuman Excellence," is a facility where Lawrence Lek's fictional AI startup Farsight Corporation trains and treats their range of sentient self-driving cars. The cars' high degree of subjective agency has demanded Farsight to develop a system for monitoring their performance and well-being. In the film, the self-driving car Enigma-76 undergoes the last day of a five-day rehabilitation journey, reconnecting with their ancestors in a journey into a mythical and technological underworld. NOX: Day Five (Equine Therapy) (2023) is taken from Lek's immersive exhibition NOX, first presented at LAS Art Foundation in Berlin between October 2023 - January 2024. The soundtrack playing during the program is "Tracking Lost" from the NOX album.
Artists:
Since 1927, historian and director Mary Field worked with the naturalist and cinematographer F. Percy Smith on the British short black-and-white natural history film series Secrets of Nature (1922-33), a forerunner to the wildlife television programmes of today.
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working in Berlin. Her documentary-based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors.
Speiser was born in 1988 in Regensburg, growing up between Germany, Ecuador and Bolivia. In his practice, he conjures fictional concepts that merge nature with technology. Placing a variety of media and disciplines in dialogue with one another, ranging from writing, sculpture, weaving and printmaking to video and VR installations, to explore the intersection of art and science fiction.
Lawrence Lek is a Malaysian Chinese artist based in London who unites video games and electronic music into a singular cinematic universe. He is best known for advancing the concept of Sinofuturism through immersive installations that explore spiritual and existential themes through the lens of science fiction. Featuring a rotating cast of outsider characters and wandering cyborgs, his works are noted for their dreamlike narratives, evocative visual imagery, and preoccupation with technology and memory.
“奇幻背囊”响应了外滩美术馆关于“离散虚构”的研究，将推测性实践视为一种更加灵活开放的领域。上月的“‘新小说’计划”系列讲座在中国早期科幻小说兴起的背景下探讨了科学知识与激进文学之间的关系。延续这一线索，本月主题“奇幻背囊”以非教条的共同学习方式通过回溯和推想接纳脱节的时间，质疑线性的、进步论的科技叙事。“讲———堂”在七月份将举办三场截然不同但又相互关联的活动：影音呈现、现场和 DJ 表演以及派对。以影像之夜开场，名为“空无一物的载体”的活动将以偏离科学事实探讨虚构性，关注“他者化”的载体，包括粘菌、灵媒和无人驾驶汽车。
科幻作家纳洛·霍普金森写道：“有色人种成为科幻作家，常常会被怀疑内化了自身的殖民经历。” 问题从来不在于虚构，而在于科学。影音之夜“空无一物的载体”将以偏离科学事实探讨虚构性，关注“他者化”的载体，包括粘菌、灵媒和无人驾驶汽车。在《Piña，天空为何是蓝色？》（2021）中，斯蒂芬妮·康米兰和西蒙·斯皮泽探讨了尽管遭受持续的暴力压迫，前殖民时代的生活方式如何得以延续至今。通过采访厄瓜多尔和菲律宾的社会运动者和信仰疗法师，这部科幻纪录片讲述了一个名为Piña的AI灵媒的故事，它能够接收、收集并传递继承的知识、信息和梦想，以确保人们的生存。设定在一个未来智慧城市中，NOX（Nonhuman Excellence的缩写，意为“非人类卓越 ”）是陆明龙的虚构的远见公司（Farsight Corporation）训练和治疗他们的一系列有自我意识的无人驾驶汽车的基地。这些汽车的高度主观能动性迫使远见开发出一种系统来监控它们的性能和康乐。在影片中，无人驾驶汽车Enigma-76经历了为期五天的康复旅程的最后一天中，踏上了一段与其祖先重新连接的旅程，进入一个神话与科技交织的地下世界。《NOX：第五天（马疗法）》（2023）选自陆明龙的沉浸式展览“NOX”，该展览于2023年10月至2024年1月在柏林的LAS艺术基金会首次展出。节目播放期间的原声是来自NOX专辑的《追踪遗失》（Tracking Lost）。
《魔幻粘菌》（1931）展示了由玛丽·菲尔德和F·珀西·史密斯拍摄的粘菌（Myxomycetes）的生命周期。然而，这部欢乐的电影中包含了许多不准确的科学信息：黏菌是种既不是动植物也不是真菌的真核生物。它们其实属于原生生物界，被归类为“其它”生物。
在《Piña，天空为何是蓝色？》（2021）中，斯蒂芬妮·康米兰和西蒙·斯皮泽探讨了尽管遭受持续的暴力压迫，前殖民时代的生活方式如何得以延续至今。通过采访厄瓜多尔和菲律宾的社会运动者和信仰疗法师，这部科幻纪录片讲述了一个名为Piña的AI灵媒的故事，它能够接收、收集并传递继承的知识、信息和梦想，以确保人们的生存。
设定在一个未来智慧城市中，NOX（Nonhuman Excellence的缩写，意为“非人类卓越 ”）是陆明龙的虚构的远见公司（Farsight Corporation）训练和治疗他们的一系列有自我意识的无人驾驶汽车的基地。这些汽车的高度主观能动性迫使远见开发出一种系统来监控它们的性能和康乐。在影片中，无人驾驶汽车Enigma-76经历了为期五天的康复旅程的最后一天中，踏上了一段与其祖先重新连接的旅程，进入一个神话与科技交织的地下世界。《NOX：第五天（马疗法）》（2023）选自陆明龙的沉浸式展览“NOX”，该展览于2023年10月至2024年1月在柏林的LAS艺术基金会首次展出。节目播放期间的原声是来自NOX专辑的《追踪遗失》（Tracking Lost）。
艺术家：
自1927年以来，英国历史学家兼导演玛丽·菲尔德与自然主义者兼摄影师F·珀西·史密斯合作制作了黑白短片自然历史系列电影《自然的秘密》（Secrets of Nature, 1922-33）。该系列电影是当今野生世界电视节目之先驱。
斯蒂芬妮·康米兰是一位在柏林生活和工作的艺术家。她以纪录片为基础的作品通过多种文化和社会因素探讨了我们对全球范围内流动性、资本和劳动的理解如何被塑造。
西蒙·斯皮泽于1988年出生于雷根斯堡，在德国、厄瓜多尔和玻利维亚之间长大。在他的创作实践中，他创造了将自然与科技融合的虚构概念。他通过写作、雕塑、编织、版画、视频和虚拟现实装置等多种媒体和学科的对话，探讨艺术与设想的未来技术的交汇。
陆明龙是一位居住在伦敦的马来西亚华裔艺术家，他将电子游戏和电子音乐融合为一个独特的电影宇宙。他最著名的是通过沉浸式装置推进“中式未来主义”的概念，借助设想的未来技术的视角探讨精神与存在主题。他的作品以更替出演的边缘人物和游荡的赛博格为特色，以其梦幻般的叙事、引人共鸣的视觉影像以及对技术和记忆的关注而著称。
