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Abstract
The trans-disciplinary practice itself is a transfer, dialogue, and connection between different technologies. In the context of Taiwan’s complex multi-colonial experience and the industrial development governed by the Other, “projection,” “calibration,” “modification,” and “critique” thus became four structural responses to the 1980s environment. In other words, these responses proactively project to internalization, constantly checking the accuracy of external information responding to the necessity of local value in a lively information society. Furthermore, in a state of structural resource scarcity, they modify the instrumentality of external information and internal needs modification of external information and systematically criticize Euro-American knowledge with the connection of local creativity and geopolitics. Undoubtedly, Hsu Chun-Yi re-manifests these structural responses developed since the 1980s in his “Eye of Aerial Machine: The Impersonal Perception of Vertical Horizon,” discussing practices of Harun Farocki, Forensic Architecture with a particular focus on Hito Steyerl’s image of nonhuman’s eyes. Such an image of the nonhuman’s eye might be called the “eye of totality,” which means that advances in technology extend the scope of viewing and make an image become the immanence or body of all things. In other words, “image” becomes a comprehensive “paracolonial” zone.
Now, we return to Taiwan, the further south of Germany (to the South of Greece). The “south” in Chinese mentality and narrative have always been standing for the migration regime, primarily referring to the south of the Yangtze River, while in the 1980s Taiwan, the “south” was transformed into a symbolic location of resistance to authoritarianism, referring to an area away from the Chinse and Taipei regime. In the 1990s, it became the political and economic target-- New Southbound (Southeast Asia) as the policy against the “Cautious Self-Restraint” strategy for “going west” (pro-China). Until the 21st century, Goldman Sachs named the “Next Eleven” list of countries in its annual report in 2005, including the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Therefore, we may conclude that the concept of “south” in Taiwan does not always refer to a specific geographical location, but political and economic opportunities and options, which have directed the industrial development and technological investment, and even changed the direction of education, art, and culture. In other words, political economy has always been an important factor of “trans-disciplinary” practices and the landscape of various “trans-disciplinary” avantgarde experiments or concrete actions. In “Making South: The ‘South’ as a Method in Taiwan Contemporary Curating,” Lu Pei-Yi investigates and analyzes three recent exhibitions in Taiwan under the theme of “the South,” making the advancement and development of the concept of the “South” in contemporary art a genealogical site of reflection.
On the one hand, technology becomes a “way of doing” that can be universally learned, replicated, and appropriated, and on the other hand, it has gradually developed into a “way of living.” When the extensive mechanization (exosomatisation) and the reflexive bio-politics (para-colonialism) converge in contemporary times, “trans-disciplinary” practices become a “technique” of capital accumulation for the privileged; however, it also serves as the “technique” of dismissing capital for those who resist the power to disguise, penetrate, and struggle. However, when capital, like power, has become the content of “relationship,” it becomes the deep-rooted connotations of life technique, making it necessary for those who resist to “play,” or rather, the way out of life itself is to “play a certain role.” Chang Wen-Hsuan then attempts to contextualize such a relational life technique in “When A Speech Acquires Its Body: Lecture Performance as An Event.” She cleverly sets up a conversational relationship between the dominant Euro-American discourse and the local language of Chen Chieh-Jen, breaking away from Taiwan’s long-standing dichotomic dynamics (the dynamics founded on the East-West confrontation and the unification/independence issue as the driving force of internal friction). Then, she returns to the essential significances of performance, role-playing, performing in “action,” “history,” and “politics.”
“Rethinking trans-disciplinary practices” must leave the formalistic manipulation of transnational cultural marketing and recognize “trans-discipline” itself has always been a “technical” issue engaging historical and political conditions and meanings. Finally, this issue attempts to present that “trans-discipline,” or the “technique of trans-disciplinary practices,” is a fundamental state of both biology and ecology. From the mitochondria to the eukaryote, from the indigenous species to the parasite, from the image itself to the poor image and the eye of machine, the “eye of totality,” we can conclude that life is not an object represented through trans-disciplinary practices, it is trans-disciplinary itself.
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