Wu Yue | 2022 Research Trip
Switzerland | Visual Arts
May 20-June 20, 2022 — Visual Arts
Nationality: China
Residency location: Digital
As an emerging curator and writer, Yue is currently pursuing M.A. in Regional Studies East Asia at Harvard University, cross registered at MIT Sloan School of Management. She has received a B.A. magna cum laude in Art History from New York University. She has been selected for the digital research trip by Pro Helvetia Shanghai in 2022, concentrating on post-digital art.
She worked as project manager of contemporary artist Xu Bing and has curated and coordinated several major exhibitions of Xu Bing, including the first overseas touring exhibition of his solo retrospective “Thought and Method.” She co-taught “Internet Art Electives” at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and gave lectures at China Academy of Art and Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Interviews have been published in The Art Newspaper, IDEAT, Architectural Practice, etc. Her curatorial project “Flatland Guerrillas: Unite! Digital Voyagers” is selected as the “Emerging Curators Project” by the Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai. The project was also exhibited at Central Academy of Art Museum and Chongqing Contemporary Art Museum.
In this residency opportunity, Yue plans to research the concept and related artworks of the Post-Digital theory with a particular interest in the intersections of art, culture, politics and technology, specifically, data governance and surveillance. The Post-Digital is a framework of theorising and contextualizing the digital age as a specific historical time. The Post-Digital intends a critical and temporal engagement with the digital while remaining partly defined by it. Most Post-Digital theorists hold that in the near future when digital technologies are smoothly integrated into human life and body that we only notice their existence in their absence or malfunction.
This extensive research topic will be narrowed down to the everyday scene of crossing the street, a cross-section of city, transportation, speed, cybernetics, and parking technologies. For example, the traffic light belongs to a complicated, centralized engineering system with cybernetic logic, each individual’s behavior conforms to the systematic governance. According to the logic, if everyone follows the rules, the state machine will function smoothly and reaches maximum efficiency. On the opposite, a street without traffic lights might be viewed as an escape from the centralized system, or as Dutch traffic engineer Hans Modermann advocated, a “shared space” that gives everyone on the street the right to the road. And jaywalking, an obvious violation of the law, could also be considered as what political scientist James Scott termed as an “everyday form of resistance. During the residency, Yue seeks to explore art and technology that are uncooperative or unruly in the post-digital age.
