This exhibition revolves around the history and production relationship between humankind and audiovisual technology. The Chinese title of this exhibition, literally translated as “life determines consciousness,” owes much of its inspiration to the famous quote of historical materialism from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It reflects Kao Chung-Li’s oeuvre that spans 40 years—his critical investigation into industrial temporal objects like photography, cinematography, sculpture, animation, and audiovisual machines, as well as his indefatigable examination of his production conditions. This exhibition comprises a diversity of technological retentions, seeking to present a place which is able to temporalize physical perception of space and spatialize physical perception of time. The audiovisual is a form of labor through which dominance and struggle proceed, and the confrontation and dialectics about it take place in this exhibition.

It is exactly in the era of technocapitalism in which productivity and control evolve in tandem that Kao’s perceptive insights into the politics within the audiovisual industry—the emotional/aesthetic politics of optics and acoustics—acquired profound significance. Kao invents handmade audiovisual mechanical devices by himself, grasps his relation to objects from an alternative perspective, reconnects himself with production, and thereby makes his own history. Just as Marx and Engels argued: “[…] people who develop their material production and their material transactions also alter their thinking and the products of their thinking with the actualities of their life;” and therefore, “it’s not consciousness that determines life, but rather life determines consciousness.”