Perhaps, We are all Martian Stand-ins in the Game World

The open ceremony of To Martian Anthropologists was held at the New Taipei Arts Center in August 2020. I was informed of the exhibition by an online voting notification on Facebook about the work of Dorian GAUDIN, Pharmakos. The artist places nine ceramics both online and offline and invites the audience to go online and vote for the ugliest ceramic. The ceramic with the highest vote of the week will be smashed in the physical exhibition venue by the curator. Only one ceramic will survive online and offline, with the shards all over the ground. Based on the result of the participation of netizens, the artist tries to share with the Martian who might visit the earth in the future, the aesthetics of the earthlings, and the work echoes the aim elaborated in the curatorial statement by Chun-Yi CHANG: “If you have already started exploring around the earth, by the exhibition entitled, To Martian Anthropologists, I would like to introduce you to some earthlings’ artworks.” 

Chun-Yi CHANG’s curatorial strategy seeks to challenge the established model of online exhibitions: “Would it be possible that an online exhibition is not just an alternative to a physical one, but a site where the exhibition and works actually take place?” She proposes a form of exhibition based on the interactive references between the virtual and real spaces, and at the same time, discusses with each artist about the relevance, interactivity, spatiality and interestingness between virtual and real works in regard to the constructive strategy. In addition, she assumes the role of coordinator between artist and engineer, completes by constant discussions each virtual work, and constructs a multi-layered structure in the world of virtuality and reality. The whole process concerns not only curating, but more likely a virtual and real exhibition with the characteristics of online art completed by the curator and artists. The curator does not confine herself in choosing the dominant theme, inviting artists and works and planning of the virtual and real venues; she goes furthermore to incorporate herself into artists and works. In other words, her role has already gone beyond the public persona of a traditional curator in charge of the production, such as discourse, selection, planning etc., but testifies an artistic practice of “curating as creation”.        

In my opinion, the event is more than just an exhibition, but an art scene of gamelike narrative that Chun-Yi Chang invites the artists to complete together. “Database Characters”, “Ambiguity of Semi-transparent Writing”, “Gamelike Realism” and “Multilayered Gamelike Framework”--the four key elements proposed by Hiroki Azuma in his A Birth of Gamelike Realism: Animalizing Postmodernity 2 (translated in Chinese in 2015) will be adopted to discuss the gamelike strategy in To Martian Anthropologists. 

Database Characters

The curatorial narrative of To Martian Anthropologists surrounds the “Martian”, a character that has been codified and has not yet appeared up to now. The relationship among curator, artist, work and human audience exists only to complete the Martian character. Traditionally, the archetype of the “Martian” appears in various science fiction novels and movies--a species of a corporal, yet imaginary existence, and the purpose of the Martian’s visit to the earth concerns either aggression or observation.  In the curator’s contextual setting, the Martian becomes a species interested in human art and aesthetics and the reason has not been elaborated or clarified, which will titillate the curiosity of the human audience in the venue and drive them to think. Hiroki Azuma (2015) believes that what the otaku does is to take the character away from the original work, to put it into different settings again, and to continue portraying the same character set in the original work. The “Martian” in the exhibition is separated from the inherent secularized image of the original character. The curator has centered on the character to set an imaginative environment which exists in the meta-narrative of the database characters. In decoding the story with the database, the author or reader can easily imagine the character appearing in other stories.  

Ambiguity of Semi-transparent Writing

According to Hiroki Azuma (2015), the language describing reality is “transparent”; “opaque” while it is detached from reality. Yet, the language of postmodern novels is “semi-transparent”. The semi-transparent narrative writing creates ambiguity between reality and illusion. To elucidate the strategy of “semi-transparent” writing, the author employs as an example the popular term “sekai-kei (world-type)” commonly used in light novels or related genres: the narrative begins by the routine relationship between the protagonists and the others, and then gradually unfolds itself in the unrealistic world situations, and finally touches huge existential issues such as “world crisis” and “armageddon”. The strategy of To Martian Anthropologists adopts as well the semi-transparent method of narrative: the creative context of the artists is related to the issues in the real world, such as space, economy, technology and politics. Hammer Price by Claude CLOSKY, for example, discusses by insinuation the relationship of value between image and art. The online work manipulates how the offline work presents itself to form an infinite loop of interaction in Blue Screen by Yu-Cheng HSIEH. In I'M LITTLE BUT I HAVE BIG DREAMS by Wan-Jen CHEN demonstrates the offline work relying on the online work to see the whole picture.  

The relationship constructed between the virtual and real works creates an authentic touch of control while the connection is at work, but no matter what kind of interactive process of creation, it is the Martian--the existence of the intended, unreal other that unites all. In the semi-transparent linguistic description that connects the virtual and the real, the curator is not only a curator, but an artist and storyteller; the artist is not only an artist, but a role in the narrative; the viewer is more than a viewer, but a controller that connects the virtual and real worlds. In the “semi-transparent” writing switching between virtuality and reality, people create and write together and choose to conserve in the cyberspace the narratives which will become fragmented clues to human civilization the Martian anthropologists come to investigate in the post-apocalyptic era.

Exhibition of Gamelike Realism

Hiroki Azuma defines the novel genre derived from the meta-narrative imagination as gamelike realism. Created and proliferated by the communication and interaction between users and systems in the world of information, the genre elaborates the grand narrative’s framework deconstructed in fragments through the gamelike, interactive participation of the Internet. In his opinion, writers of today will locate a story in a certain situation in circulation to highlight a theme, and the facts of external nature themselves can be recalled to enter into the work. By introducing the composite viewpoint, they render the seemingly fantastic, absurd and inorganic fantasy novels from the naturalist viewpoint to be read and interpreted in a completely different manner. Imagination will automatically roam wild, giving rise to the possibility to transcend nature.        

The world of the traditional form of exhibition is a real world, presenting each unrelated individual story, and the connection between the stories only occurs in the discursive arrangement of the curator. However, To Martian Anthropologists adopts a gamelike curatorial approach: by the narrative of gamelike realism and all sorts of familiar external objects, the curator extends in each artist’s work the images in the little narratives of the objects produced by the public interaction. The interactive process will enhance the audience’s interest to the exhibition and gamelike interactive participation, and in a more significant manner, construct a more complete story and meet the demand of a fictional other. The environment created by the exhibition is an imaginary, fantastic world where time travel is possible. The works left on the Internet testify the existence of the curator and artists for the Martian; the interactive program design is a strategy to invite the Martian to follow the logical action of the earthlings. The Martian becomes a game player incorporated in the game world designed by the earthlings to feel and listen to what people on Earth call “art”.

Multilayered Gamelike Framework

In the spatial configuration of the physical venue, the curator puts into consideration the relative relationship between work and space, between the works. “It’s a bit like playing chess, like a continuous process of rehearsal in the mind.” Chun-Yi CHANG’s deductive process results in an exhibition structure, incorporating a multilayered gamelike framework, with a complex world view and single-line narrative. Each work has its own virtual and real space and interactive relationship level. In addition, the works among themselves in the physical space create new relationships and an exhibition mode by which the audience can shuttle between levels.

For example, Joyce HO in 20200804 uses a red wire to cross the exhibition venue to create some space of compressed frames, and it ends up dropping from the ceiling and connecting to a light bulb above a glass of water of the accurately measured height. In Breeze, Chih-Sheng LAI installs, in the entrance hall between the two exhibition rooms, a ceiling fan rotating slowly to engender a real flow of wind passing unnoticed by the body, which echoes the constantly rotating loading symbol on the Internet. The online switch in Calibrate: Blue Screen by Yu-Cheng HSIEH manipulates simultaneously the online blue screen and offline physical light bulb to provoke a real shift of signals. In Discreet Works (thanks to Bruegel), Eric WATIER and Chun-Yi CHANG retranslate Bruegel’s painting Netherlandish Proverbs about human movements into the instructions of human behaviors (imperative sentences) displayed in the physical venue. The audience is invited online to understand the texts and then to look for the corresponding images of human movements. After the correct image is found, the drawing delineated in white and black will turn into a colored one. When all the instructions correspond to the correct images, the whole painting of Bruegel will appear. However, after the physical exhibition comes to an end, the constructed relationship and multilayered framework--framed space created by the red wire, aerial view of the virtual and real references and symbolic signs of the physical objects, etc.--will all become records and the Martian can only imagine the multilevel relationships in the physical venue and evoke a sense of the past through the works on the web pages and textual records. 

Conclusion

The viewer set in the narrative of To Martian Anthropologists is the other who is not present, i.e., a single Martian or a group of Martians who might visit on the earth in the future to see how human beings discuss about art by reading the samples created by a group of earthlings. But, would it be true that the Martian is not really present? Would they attend personally the site in response to the call of the thematic keywords? At the very moment, curator, artist and viewer--we are all merely busy players from God’s perspective of the Martian. The curatorial setting of Chun-Yi CHANG is derived from the book In the Name of Art by the Belgian art critic Thierry de Duve, who “invites readers to imagine themselves as the anthropologists coming to Earth from Mars, and to re-examine the human art world from a perspective external to the people on Earth.” The curator hopes that “the assumption tries to imply that we should temporarily cast away (or at least be conscious of) the prejudices too deep-rooted to be noticed in the face of art, and can provide an enlightening vision of the future at the same time.” However, in the setting of the game rules, the viewer is invited to adopt a new “perspective” and unconsciously, brings her/himself into God’s perspective of the Martian and then becomes a Martian stand-in, roaming in the game world to complete the Martian’s mission to explore human beings.  

Reference:

Azuma, Hiroki. A Birth of Gamelike Realism: Animalizing Postmodernity 2. Kodansha, 2007. 

Yu-Chuan TSENG

Digital artist and curator. Graduated with a Ph.D from Institute of Applied Arts, NCTU, she is now professor at the department of public relations & advertising, Shih-Hsin University.