Abstract
Humans have an intrinsic need to preserve the corporeal existence of things. From an individual's collection of a fragile stamp to the collective protection of an endangered species, the human need and desire for preservation always exists. The action of preservation reflects human’s effort to prevent things from changing, decaying, dying, or other unfavorable states resulting from not-preserving.
My thesis project is devoted to uncover the dichotomy between preserving and not-preserving by visualizing, analyzing, and ultimately questioning such dichotomy through multiple layers of analysis and interpretation. The research process revolves around three scopes, human as individual, human as community and human as species. Various research methods are applied in this process, including literature review, cultural probes, ethnography etc. that contribute to the content of my design experiments. I aim to present and propose to my audience with an alternative perspective to evaluate the duality of this either-or choice: preserving or not-preserving, and eventually recognize the supreme power resting in both of them when they intertwine.
Written Description
My thesis project presents my study on the human action of preserving through different layers of analysis and interpretations: What are we preserving? Why does preservation matter? What if we quit preserving? Human, as the subject of this action, is examined through three scopes: human as individual, human as community and human as species.
On an individual level, preservation could be interpreted as keeping, not disposing of something that holds value to the owner. Individual’s preservation leads to possession of objects, which contributes to building a continuity of self as well as a tangible connection to internal experiences and the external world.
On a community level, people from a community collectively construct their history through preservation of certain historical records. Community archives, for example, are formed by informal, marginalized groups to search for alternative truth through a series of social exchanges. Preservation to a community not only means a memorial of its past, but also shows responsibility towards the future through the revelation of a truthful reality alternative to national or colonial records.
When it comes to humans as a species, my argument is largely in line with Henrot’s: the preservation of our species implies human power beyond other species on the earth. By making animal specimens as a way of preservation, aren’t humans essentially depriving other species of life for human’s need for knowledge?
However, all the worldly existences are subject to the natural law of time-passing, even with human’s intervention against it. Thus, human preservation is sometimes paradoxically acts of destruction of such order.This intervention becomes even more permanent as the global proliferation of capitalist biotechnologies, which aims for complete control over life and death through genetic data. Recognizing such a phenomenon prompts me to move forward by constructing an alternative: If preserving means time and space are under control of human power over the order of nature, then not preserving deliberately renounces such power, hence the flow of time and space are indulged by nature — the world will be staged at a state of constant changing, moving, decaying, and refreshing.
The action of not preserving manifests “the potentiality to not-be '' (Giorgio Agamben, 1993): it is not simply lacking in power or being incapable, instead, it demonstrates the ability to not-be; it is capable of its own impotence. On one hand, we demonstrate our power beyond the order of nature through preservation. On the other hand, our choice of not preserving suggests the power to renounce this superiority over nature: the power to not-be. While technological advancement allows us to feel more powerful to preserve, which essentially negates and abandons our potential to not-preserve, our true nature, which is our humanity, rests in our potential to not-preserve. According to Agamben, recognizing our potentiality not only to our ability to preserve but to our own impotence to preserve discloses “a supreme power that is capable of both power and impotence.” Therefore, power and impotence can coexist, and so do preserving and not preserving: they are not mutually exclusive and sometimes interchangeable. What I would like my audience to take away from my project is a framework of analysis on the power to be and not-be exhibited by preserving (and/or not preserving) a subject matter. It will serve as an intellectual lens through which the audience will be able to refresh their understanding towards the surrounding, to interrogate the traditional western philosophy of dualism, and to consider possibilities inhabited in alternatives.
Plan and timeline for experiments
Experiment 1:
A series of case studies across three disciplines (natural science, social science and language) to closely identify, observe and study both the acts of preserving and not-preserving : their intention, mechanism and consequences. Graphic works and small artifacts are supplemented to my studies in order to bring abstract concepts into physical form, visualize a narrative or just provide some textual context of the subject. And each of the case study they came out as a kind of package or archive. They together serve as a visual entry for the audience to get an initial concept of my project.
Experiment 2:
a booklet-based narration where a conceptual model is brought into the analysis of the subjects. The content is less analytical but more poetic and surreal.
Experiment 3:
a website-based archive of all images, fonts, or any other visual elements I used during the making process. They will all be hyperlinked and subject to any change from the original sources, or domain expiration etc. This archive will be expected to represent the meaning of preservation and decay in the digital world.
[Timeline for the experiments]
Mapping
Precedential projects
Grosse Fatigue, 2013
Camille Henrot
Grosse Fatigue considers the museum’s restless accumulation of objects and dead animal specimens—often achieved through forms of violence, like genocide, extinction, and environmental damage—that feeds our infinite hunger for knowledge. If vanity has compelled us to construct our own history through forms of possession and death, Henrot considers the underlying impulses that continue to drive new technologies and the seduction of constructing ourselves online.
<PROJECTION>
Interspecies Futures [IF] , 2021
Curated by Oscar Salguero
[IF] is the first survey of bookworks by leading international practitioners from the contemporary fields of bio-art and speculative design who have turned to the book as a tool for the proposal of alternative human-nonhuman scenarios.It introduces practices that cover a large range of positions toward the nonhuman, and propose new eco-conscious alternatives. Some of the practices also imply trans-species dreams.
Digital Colonialism, 2016-2019
Morehshin Allahyari
Since 2016, Allahyari has advanced the concept of digital colonialism to characterize the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations. This performance focuses on the 3D scanner, which is widely used by archaeologists to capture detailed data about physical artifacts, considering how these narratives intersect materially and poetically and how they may be resituated and rewritten.
<TRACING>
Le Pain Symbiotique, 2014
Anicka Yi
Employing materials such as soaps, potato chips, milk, and hair gel, Anicka Yi creates tactile and fragrant sculptures, paintings, and installations that play on the paradox between the enduring, timelessness of art, and ideas of impermanence. “I'm interested in connections between materials and materialism, states of perishability and their relationship to meaning and value, consumerist digestion and cultural metabolism,” she says.
<TRACING & PROJECTION>
To be Preserved without scandal and corruption , 2020
Gabriel Rico
This work is characterized by the interrelation of seemingly disparate objects. Self-proclaimed “ontologist with a heuristic methodology,” Gabriel Rico pairs found, collected, and manufactured materials to create sculptures that invite viewers to reflect on the relationship between humans and our natural environment.
<TRACING>
Beijing Preservation, 2003
OMA
> The dilemma: building is less permanent in Asia and restoration often leads to a harsh reconstruction from zero that removes all traces of authenticity in favor of rigid, bloated rebuilding. In the name of preservation, the past is made unrecognizable.
> The most visionary approach to preservation would be to use it in a prospective rather than retrospective way by declaring different areas of the city to be preserved for different periods of time.
<PROJECTION & INTERVENTION>
Camille Henrot
Grosse Fatigue considers the museum’s restless accumulation of objects and dead animal specimens—often achieved through forms of violence, like genocide, extinction, and environmental damage—that feeds our infinite hunger for knowledge. If vanity has compelled us to construct our own history through forms of possession and death, Henrot considers the underlying impulses that continue to drive new technologies and the seduction of constructing ourselves online.
<PROJECTION>
Interspecies Futures [IF] , 2021
Curated by Oscar Salguero
[IF] is the first survey of bookworks by leading international practitioners from the contemporary fields of bio-art and speculative design who have turned to the book as a tool for the proposal of alternative human-nonhuman scenarios.It introduces practices that cover a large range of positions toward the nonhuman, and propose new eco-conscious alternatives. Some of the practices also imply trans-species dreams.
Digital Colonialism, 2016-2019
Morehshin Allahyari
Since 2016, Allahyari has advanced the concept of digital colonialism to characterize the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations. This performance focuses on the 3D scanner, which is widely used by archaeologists to capture detailed data about physical artifacts, considering how these narratives intersect materially and poetically and how they may be resituated and rewritten.
<TRACING>
Le Pain Symbiotique, 2014
Anicka Yi
Employing materials such as soaps, potato chips, milk, and hair gel, Anicka Yi creates tactile and fragrant sculptures, paintings, and installations that play on the paradox between the enduring, timelessness of art, and ideas of impermanence. “I'm interested in connections between materials and materialism, states of perishability and their relationship to meaning and value, consumerist digestion and cultural metabolism,” she says.
<TRACING & PROJECTION>
To be Preserved without scandal and corruption , 2020
Gabriel Rico
This work is characterized by the interrelation of seemingly disparate objects. Self-proclaimed “ontologist with a heuristic methodology,” Gabriel Rico pairs found, collected, and manufactured materials to create sculptures that invite viewers to reflect on the relationship between humans and our natural environment.
<TRACING>
Beijing Preservation, 2003
OMA
> The dilemma: building is less permanent in Asia and restoration often leads to a harsh reconstruction from zero that removes all traces of authenticity in favor of rigid, bloated rebuilding. In the name of preservation, the past is made unrecognizable.
> The most visionary approach to preservation would be to use it in a prospective rather than retrospective way by declaring different areas of the city to be preserved for different periods of time.
<PROJECTION & INTERVENTION>