Sean X. Luo
Post-postmodern Nonsense
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| Chris Csikzentmihalyi and his
edgy products by SEAN LUO July 07, 2005 Walking out of the Beijing Railroad Station few weeks ago, I finally caught a glimpse of what I reminisced. Shanghai, the city in which I was born, was wedged in a brightly colored post-colonial quandary, exemplified by its ostensibly brand new public toilets with extraneous LCDs screens but no toilet paper. Beijing, though, was still all old fashioned translucent polyester shirts and sun-tanned countenances that only popped up in foreign movie festivals and PBS documentaries. Bicycles and dust covered roads surrounded the stately Imperial Palace basking in the dusk, lugubriously. I can't say I wasn't as absorbed, if only momentarily, as I was when I was strolling across the quiet battlefield of Culloden outside of Inverness just a year ago. I was there not just to admire the old. I met Evan, quite fortuitously, when I got my passport renewed at the New York Chinese Consulate a couple of months back. He was a friendly skinny red haired dude waiting in line like an unfitting sore thumb, with a laptop computer screen lightened up by beautiful floating patterns made out of the Latin alphabet. He informed me that being a student at Parson’s, he was responsible for setting up an avant-garde, multimedia art exhibit that was going to happen in Beijing. I discovered that it was right around the time when I was going to be there, so I happily wrote down his e-mail and the website of the exhibit. The first day of the exhibit--the lecture series--was a bit of a big deal, and being a hapless tourist without an invitation, I was denied entrance. I wasn't going to capitulate after a cross-town hunt for the museum, and was coerced into the use of the lowest of the cheap shots: pretending to be a foreigner. I decided to only speak English, and their one-sided incomprehension was used to my advantage. I sat in a chair waiting for the large group that went out for lunch to come back and legitimize me. They never did, and the Chinese sponsors, two attractive young girls from The School of The Arts at Tisnghua University, decided to shed some pity on me and granted me a free invitation. I waltzed into the lecture hall unscathed. It supposedly cost $100. The first two hours of keynote was ridiculously lethargic: all principles and no exemplars. The Q&A session that followed was better, when I, in my amateur audacity, raised my hand and asked Bruce Wands, a department head at School of Visual Arts in New York, whether and how they encourage scientists and artists to work together. He threw out some soft-core answer, but I was slightly taken aback when Jeffery Huang, a professor at Harvard’s School of Design reminded me that when such collaboration did take place, it was often the scientists who were less inclined to learn or make art. It rang eerily true, and I had an epileptic flashback of a couple of dazed physical science majors from college utterly bored by all art old and new. In any case, the second part was impressive and eye opening. Curtis Bahn and Tomie Hahn's Pikapika was a brilliant combination of chorography, music and technology: Tomie wore a metallic suit, making movements while making robotic clinking and clanking at the same time. It reminded me of playing wooden trucks in my childhood, voicing out the noise of a real engine. But the best part was Christopher Csikzentmihalyi's forty minute presentation. When I saw his name first on the program, I figured it would be a bearded, practical looking stern professor with a thick accent. He turned out to be a youthful, slightly plump, but certainly sharp neophyte of MIT’s famed Media Lab. He started summarizing his circuitous career path from art school, to the Bell Laboratories, and back to art again. His lab's direction was to produce irrelevant, irreverent, "edgy" products that, well, fell outside of the mainstream R&D ideology. His first work was called The Afgan Explorer: a robotic machine that resembled the Mars Explorer, except it was meant to serve the freedom of press: to take pictures of places where no journalists would have proper access. It had its cool solar powered battery packs and stereo camera system, but deployment remained a problem as he showed us a humorous video of one of his graduate students launched a rocket on MIT's quads to its own demise. Another graduate student of his worked on a little camera system that was roped to a parachute that would capture the birds-eye of a political demonstration. Governments often suppressed the real number of attendance of a particular protest in order to trivialize it, and this system, along with a computer-aided analysis module, would make it easy to count the real number of people who showed up. A third student devised an eco-product detector: he made a handheld device that would scan barcodes in a supermarket, and fed it to an Internet database that would recall how bad/good the product's environmental record was, and bleeped accordingly like a Geiger counter for radioactivity. His other works were not as highfalutin, but nonetheless followed his edgy philosophy to its essence. One of the machines he produced would disconnect all cell phones within the radius of a couple of meters with the press of a button: the next time you see someone sitting next to you at a Starbucks yapping endlessly over his Nokia, you'll be able to take your revenge. It is not legal to sell such a device in the US, but it's not terribly hard to make one yourself, and his electronics guide is freely available over the web. Scream record/release bags and noise activated food processors were a bit more esoteric. A dorky looking female graduate student had a marsupial-like bag constantly strapped to her chest. She screamed into it during (what I believed to be) a thesis committee meeting, and then played it back to busy traffic where the milieu was more appropriate for acute emotional release. The yelling activated food processor was, of course, custom made for bored housewives. I was consistently amazed by the range of ideas that were demonstrated by his projects, often possessing not just political and practical values but also a strange artistic elegance. And the technological and scientific know-how would make any real student of science take notes. Of course, it's not real science and these graduate students surely unfairly have a much better time with their dissertations than I do: no pain, no gain is my self-righteous justification. But I admire the value of such projects with the sympathy of a kindred spirit. It's a different world, but it's still the same world. Equations and electrodes, in the end, dissolve into a vague, emotionally salient morass. When I was at the Kilmartin House Museum in the heart of Scotland, I stood in front of a particular old rock flint. The regularity of the sharp edge was undoubtedly a result of numerous experimental trials and errors, but I could imagine the numerous extra pieces lying around but never got thrown out, not because they were useful, but because they were pretty to look at. Some things haven't changed for a couple thousand years at all. |