I was initially inspired to research more on the topic of Sinofuturism after watching a documentary by Lawrence Luk at Metrograph for the Asian Counterfutures festival hosted by the Asian-American Arts Alliance.
“Sinofuturism is a conspiracy theory and manifesto about parallels between artificial intelligence, geopolitics, and Chinese technological development.
Sinofuturism is an invisible movement — a spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals, and a million veiled narratives. It is a movement, not based on individuals, but on multiple overlapping flows. Flows of populations, of products, and of processes.”
Continuing from my first project, I’m interested in understanding my Chinese identity more deeply through the lens of technology and AI. While doing some preliminary research, I came across this book by Benjamin Bratton, whom I deeply admire, on China’s implementation of artificial intelligence, big data and automation to increase their productivity on a mass scale.
this book is coming out in….2079!?
I’ve also been reading McKenzie Wark’s essay on Wang Hui’s *Twentieth-Century China* exploring China’s contemporary history. It was extremely fascinating to me to learn about my civilization’s history from this point of view, after being ingrained with what it means to be Chinese growing up in the West mostly through the lens of Western media. I’ve realized that I have to unlearn so much of what I know about my people and my culture in order to understand and get to the core of what it means to be Chinese today. As the geopolitical tension between US and China continues to deepen, I want to create narratives that propose alternative futures that counteract the systems of colonization and imperialism that drive our economies today. I was deeply affected by the passing of the Anti-China Propoganda Bill in the House of Reps earlier this Fall, and how this could worsen people’s view on China globally.
However, when analyzing the ways in which China has successfully lifted its people out of poverty in the last 30 years, and used technology as a means to achieve a better and more equitable society, I think it’s worth examining their execution as an example for other developing countries. This is what Sinofuturism seeks to unpack: “It is a science fiction that already exists.”
“At a material level, it is already everywhere: in architecture, in the products and technologies that we use every day.”
Following my last project documenting my ancestral Hakka history, I’ve been thinking a lot about agriculture and land as a tool for class mobility, and self-sustaining civilizations. Hakka people used farming not only as a tool for their survival, but also challenged existing practices through innovation. They were forced to farm on infertile land in the mountains, and had to create new (equitable) practices such as having women working on the farms as well, because labor was scarce and the entire community was expected to help one another.
For this project, I’m interested in how AI can be incorporated into these traditional farming practices as an act of resilience and promote Chinese culture as an exemplary alternative to current class systems.
“This essential unknowability of the AI to the human, of the mystique of a consciousness beyond conventional understanding, is exactly the same 'Other' identified in Orientalism. It is this oppositional 'Other' which Sinofuturism identifies with, reorienting the technological narrative in a way that the nameless, faceless mass of Chinese labour becomes a collective body.”
“make farming sexy again!!! (with AI)”