Filmstill: Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) (2016, HD Video, 60 Min – Copyright: Lawrence Lek, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London)

China – Made in Europe

Review

The movie Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) by Lawrence Lek is an essay; it is science fiction; it is radical realism. The Basic message: while Europe is stuck in the past, China leaps into the future. In the anxious eyes of the Europeans, the «superpower» represents the fully-automated world of tomorrow, found in products, server farms, and artificial intelligence. Does Sinofuturism confront us with an inhuman dystopia? No, says Norient author Philipp Rhensius. It all just depends on the perspective on our world.

I remember exactly the uneasy feeling when I watched the horror movie 28 Days Later. The scariest thing was not the dystopian scenes of zombies killing humans killing zombies, it was the post-apocalyptic, confusingly calm beginning: in a long single shot, the main character wakes up from his coma in a hospital, steps out on the street as the camera floats above a deserted London, while he gradually learns that the world has declined. It is this image of a city devoid of any signs of a living civilization that I am reminded of when watching the essay film Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD). The difference, though, is that the few humans present are not in fear of extermination by monsters, but of being replaced by machines – which is far more likely to happen.

Lawrence Lek’s essay movie is not a nostalgic lament about us poor humans becoming superfluous in the face of superior technologies. It is – on the contrary – a cynical affirmation of the idea that technology, at least in East Asia, has won. By taking the Eurocentric stereotypes about China seriously, Sinofuturism deals with the entire catalogue of clichés, from gambling to addiction, labour, fake, and not to forget: dehumanization.

Through the Eyes of a Gamer

Sinofuturism shows what's left when humans are gone: a world inhabited by data cables, server farms, robots, games, and a few humans who are either pitiful characters or catatonic creatures wearing VR headsets. To emphasize this, Lek, who was born in Germany of Malaysian-Chinese decent, uses the first person rather than third person perspective. This point of view is similar to one of a gamer. It throws the spectator into a mode of observing, suggesting: if the machines have taken over, we are doomed to be passive observers of a world that is out of (human) control.

But isn't this «future» already here? And if yes, does it have to be bleak? If we desperately hold on to the idea that humans are the center of our world, it surely is. Sinofuturism, however, is not interested in cultural pessimism. Instead, it is more in line with sociologist Bruno Latour’s theory developed in the 1980s, in which he describes life on earth as a dynamic relationship between heterogenic entities. The «Actor-Network Theory» resists any dichotomies (object/subject, nature/society) in social theory, and instead assigns equal amounts of agency to both human and non-humans.

Welcome to the Digital Future

According to this theory, everything has a certain agency to shape the world, from data cables to a human brain or an organizational structure. Having this in mind, the world devoid of humans in 28 Days Later is different from the one in Lek's film. It isn't necessarily a dystopia that we fear, but a (new) reality of which we are conscious.

Therefore, Sinofuturism communicates two important aspects. It not only deconstructs Eurocentric stereotypes towards a nation of more than 1,386 billion people, but it also invites us to accept the contingency of a digital and alienated future that China represents. Contemporary China might already have won the battle of modernity, and in its efforts to be a political world power it is far more oriented towards a (better?) future than the nostalgic west.

If we understand this in line with a more non-anthropocentric and accelerationist point of view that seeks, for example, a fully automated economy, this alienation of humans from their «immediate» world has enormous potential. A potential for enonomic and social emancipation from a world in which we are not replaced, but radically complemented by machines.

Biography

Philipp Rhensius is an editor for Norient, writer, musician, sound artist, sociologist & musicologist, and curator from Berlin. His work investigates the connections between the micro- and macro-political and is driven by the idea that «feeling the chains» is the moment when emancipation begins. His music and sound art projects (Kl.ne, aphtc, Alienationst) merge sonic fiction with sardonic poetry and visceral sound. His texts are published in i.e. Taz, Spex, FAZ, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, WOZ and several book volumes. He runs the music label Arcane Patterns and hosts a monthly podcast on Noods Radio. Follow him on Instagram, his Website, or LinkedIn.

Published on January 07, 2019

Last updated on April 10, 2024

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Alienation

Capitalism

Colonialism

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Norient Musikfilm Festival NMFF 9 (2019)

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Filmstill: Oulaya’s Wedding (Hisham Mayet, Brittany Nugent, Cyrus Moussavi, USA, 2017).

When Voyeurism Exceeds Exotism

Commentary

by Christopher Kirkley

In the latest film Oulaya's Wedding from «Sublime Frequencies», one is thrown into the middle of a traditional wedding in the Western Sahara. But is the overwhelming proximity to the colourful celebrations able to bypass exoticism, asks the director and archivist Christopher Kirkley.

Oulaya’s Wedding, the latest film of «Sublime Frequencies» co-founder Hisham Mayet and the directors Brittany Nugent and Cyrus Moussavi, takes us to the Western Sahara. It profiles the events of a typical Hassaniya wedding. Oulaya is the daughter of a popular wedding musician and member of the Sublime Frequencies music group Doueh. But instead of a person, the main character is the wedding itself – and the camera becomes another spectator at a wedding where everyone wants to be seen. This creates a constant challenge of how to circumvent the filmic gaze with its subjects.

The voice-overs, interviews, and subtitled conversation, stand in contrast to Mayet’s typical work. The largely impressionistic pictures that indulge in the overwhelming exoticism of transcultural experience, seem to exist in another realm of Sublime Frequencies. But yet, the film does not offer a one dimensional perspective. Instead, the camera is always acknowledged. In one scene, it lingers after an interview, and one hears the translator explaining in English to the filmmaker. We are reminded that even in these most didactic moments, there is a mediation.

Voyeurs Being Watched Themselves

It is beneficial that the subject of the film is a wedding, an event that is no stranger to the camera, as weddings have been recorded since spectators could film themselves, and some interspersed DV footage of the wedding is a nice callback to this. In Oulaya’s Wedding, the five day celebration itself is a stage and a performance for every attendee. It is lavish and overwhelming, an onslaught of color and sensation, and offers a space full of voyeurs that are – dressed in the finest hyper-colored fabrics or showering in money bills like the musicians – being watched themselves.

There is just one person whose face is never seen: Oulaya herself. When she finally makes an appearance, towards the end of the film, she’s draped in a mulafa, her face obscured through the dark fabric. Like a one-way mirror, a fine mesh, and she watches the wedding in secret. Whatever expressions she’s making under the mulafa, whatever she's thinking, is not for us to see. In that way, we share more with Oulaya than any other guest. Hidden behind the camera, unseen, we sit in the crowd and watch.

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Biography

Christopher Kirkley is a musicologist and the creator of Sahelsounds.com, a project exploring the cultural and musical phenomena of the Sahel region of West Africa. The Sahel is sparsely populated by nomads and semi-nomadic herders as well as first generation urban youth on motorbikes, with cellphone memory cards and USB keys dangling around their necks. Christopher will tell us an inspring story about how field recordings, interviews, ad-hoc video, YouTube archeology and cellphone data collection come together as archival and storytelling devices for the music and sound of the Sahel. Follow him on Sahelsounds.com or LinkedIn.

Published on January 08, 2019

Last updated on April 29, 2024

Topics

Exotica

Voyeurism

Tradition

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Norient Musikfilm Festival NMFF 9 (2019)

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Filmstill: Liberation Day (Ugis Olte, Sorten Traavik, Latvia/Norway/Slovenia 2016)

A Disenchanting Encounter

Short Essay

by Friedemann Pestel

The Slovenian cult band Laibach has been invited to perform in North Korea as part of the celebration of the National Liberation Day. Is this tour cultural diplomacy in the traditional sense? Or promotion? And if yes, for whom? Historian Friedemann Pestel takes a critical look at the movie Liberation Day and on the ambivalent role of its director Morten Traavik.

In 2015, Laibach’s visit to North Korea was a sensation; it marked the first appearance of a foreign rock band in one of the most isolated countries of the world, a communist state that few people from outside have actually seen. At first, this event seems like another case of a cultural encounter between the West and the East, between a democracy and a people’s republic, between the capitalist and the communist world, a promotion of artistic freedom and self-expression.

Is Laibach in Pyongyang, therefore, just a new sort of cultural diplomacy? In the field of classical music, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra visited the Soviet Union in 1959, the Berlin Philharmonic in China in 1979, or the New York Philharmonic again in North Korea as recent as in 2008 (the latter performed the folk song Arirang, just as Laibach did seven years later). Traditionally, such visits involve planning and negotiations between public and private representatives of both countries, and were seen from both sides as part of international cultural relations.

A One-Sided Relationship

In the case of Laibach, the political involvement was rather one-sided. The North Korean regime invited the band for the 70th anniversary of Korean independence from Japan, of which Korea had been a colony since 1910. But there was no Slovenian participation aside from the band's appearance – Slovenian officials even refrained from attending the concert, let alone promoted the project. As for Laibach, they remained quite silent on their motivations, and they seemed to represent themselves and their own controversial image rather than a national regime, ideology, or value system. This image, in return, seemed to «echo», in Slavoj Žižek’s terms, the self-representation of the North Korean regime.

Filmstill: Liberation Day (Ugis Olte, Morten Traavik, Latvia/Norway/Slovenia 2016)

Yet, this was precisely where mutual disenchantment began: The North Korean officials quickly discovered that Laibach’s symbolism was too ambiguous to fit into the regime’s antifascist ideology (whereas their own cult of leadership and mass spectacles hardly impressed the foreign visitors). Instead, if Laibach actually did convey a message of propaganda, it was entirely for their own branding, and collided with their individualism. Their understanding of «propaganda» seemingly owed more to the older roots of the term in advertisement and promotion than to ideological instrumentalization - the somehow anachronistic representation of the North Korean regime, in European eyes, turned into a stage set for a commercialised performance pattern that had already been proven successful at a global scale.

Subversion Never Got a Chance

During the band's visit to North Korea, there was also little opportunity for playful political subversion. If Laibach ever expected to play on an ambivalent register by putting their own authoritarian visual aesthetics in relation to North Korean state propaganda, this idea was quickly pulverised by the harsh realities of bureaucracy and logistics. The documentary shows how lacking screens and cables, censorship, and a mock audience for the dress rehearsal left little room for irony or ambiguity – very much, one might argue, to the disappointment of Western democratic viewing expectations.

During the concert, the camera – a bit too ostensibly for Laibach’s international fame – looked for signs of emancipation or conversion in the faces of the audience. Instead, the reactions captured suggest a more complex relationship between performers and listeners largely sticking to their trodden patterns of reception – voluntarily or not. The party rally applause Laibach received at the end might have – or not – disillusioned the band; it certainly disabuses the film audience about the immediate effects of cultural diplomacy.

An Arranged Affair

We might, therefore, provocatively ask whether Laibach in North Korea was not, all in all, a lukewarm event, with domesticated reactions on both sides and a spirit of compromise that, in the outcome, offended no party involved. Before coming to such conclusions, we might yet try another approach to the film by looking beyond the two sides involved – Laibach and their North Korean hosts. We might ask some questions about a «third» instance that played a decisive role in getting them involved: Why was the visit of the band in the world’s most isolated regime, one that attempts to fully control its image to the outside, so well documented by a film crew? The end credits are given to North Korean foreign embassies and to Norwegian and Latvian public film funding agencies: What do they tell us about the cultural and diplomatic relations behind?

What part did the film’s co-director play? Especially considering that at the same time he had the role of the official leader of the foreign delegation, well-experienced in dealing with the authoritarian authorities, and included having to make artistic and political compromises on behalf of the band. To what extend could a documentary be independent or neutral given the control of artistic performance in North Korea that includes music as well as film?

The Director as Impresario

This film is not only a film about the ambivalence of attraction and misunderstanding between a group of artists and a political regime, but also about an impresario figure with his own professional agenda: on the one hand, a frequent visitor and long-term collaborator with the North Korean regime in artistic matters; on the other hand, a business relation with Laibach as their «director» in more than one sense in North Korea, but also as a co-creator of their visual aesthetics in videoclips. As Laibach and North Korea regularly raise attention independently from each other, their combined promotion promised to be a commercial success.

Towards his partners, the impresario may have understood himself as a cultural and commercial broker rather than a political actor. He may have seen his job as that of setting up an artistic performance, and not a political demonstration. He may have «culturalised» ideological divergences into questions of «respect» or «communication» when dealing with reluctant North Korean officials. He may have considered his work as a commitment to the parties involved or as neutral intermediation. But the spectators of the film may also consider his role as another layer of ambivalence in a complex setting of artistic production. This key makes the film even more thought-provoking and debatable in the best sense of the term.

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Biography

Friedemann Pestel is a lecturer in modern European history at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. He studied history, French literature, and educational sciences in Jena and Paris. In 2013, he received his PhD from the University of Freiburg with a study on émigrés of the French Revolution. Currently, he is working on a history of global tours of German and Austrian symphony orchestras in the 20th century. He was a research fellow at the German Historical Institutes in Paris and London and at the University of Vienna. His research interests and publications include the French and Haitian Revolutions, political migration, memory studies, and musical life in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Published on January 02, 2019

Last updated on April 11, 2024