Logistics
E: Mixed bags are okay, anyhow. i think the need to play with formats now more than ever before are not because crisis is upon us, but because the problems with the infrastructure have been revealed more blatantly and why art/design/culture are still important is because they deal with the formats and comings together and ways of seeing and playing that precede the politics that most everyday folk don’t even realise addresses (or neglects, or unfairly treats) them. So education, and welfare, and government funding, all need to go through a self-reflexive hall of mirrors, so to speak.
F: I couldn’t agree more. At the same time, I’m afraid of the empty gestures and buzzwords that will get ticked off (like, for example, “care” as a now-ubiquitous noun in art project funding application prose) if this becomes more mainstream. In Europe, I also witness the constant failure of artists to truly commit to collective projects and not just use them as platforms for displaying/performing their individual portfolio work.
E: Re: the hype on care, hahahah, yes, we’ve watched that build up over the last year to no surprise at all, but i guess that’s the nature of hype, isn’t it. The tricky thing about care, and so many practices actually, is that they are things that really need to be enacted rather than theorised. but the need to repeat repeat repeat to people who even see what’s lacking in the system (e.g., the hegemony) somehow also gives us down in the undercommons a tremendous pressure to re-educate re-educate re-educate those in power.
[F: And I wonder whether “undercommons” aren’t suffering the same cycle as “care”. What I find amusing is that, especially in Europe where people aren’t familiar with the notion of the university commons (since there are almost no campus universities in continental Europe), the undercommons are constantly conflated with the notion of the (economic/ecological) commons.]
E: it’s hard… the Radio Slumber project with Amy actually also deals very much with these issues, but it’s almost because of the overwhelming presence of care discourse now that it makes me hesitant to address it so much. we shall see…! that project will now be delayed yet again, to premiere more likely in February or March.
What you mentioned about the failure to really collectivise in Europe is also a problem in Hong Kong and China. When we were invited to participate in the Unlived by What is Seen exhibition in 2014, the curators told us they wanted to include HomeShop as a collective practice because they felt that all the other collectives they saw in China at the time were merely solidarity-for-opportunity kinds of conglomerations, often splitting up when the group becomes famous enough that the individuals can then make their way with solo careers.
So it’s no wonder that so many of us have that starry-eyed fascination with the many Indonesian collectives, hahaha, but of course as discussed with my friend Riar in a talk a couple of weeks ago, there are many problems there as well that tend not to get discussed publicly, and that exportation of nongkrong can in some ways be just as much of a selling strategy like anything else.
Re: Yanting (sorry if my romanisation is incorrect, don’t have the hang of Taiwanese romanisation, ha), wow, that’s really wonderful, thank you so much. What needs to be picked up are the Black Book Assembly newsletters that are currently stationed at Amy’s flat, mentioned in our talk, hehe… I think it may be quite a big stack, but of course she doesn’t have to take all, just what is convenient for her (anyhow it may not be easy to get them from Taiwan to HK, either, hahah). But if she knows some spaces in Taichung where they may be read, she is also free to distribute a few copies! (a few have been distributed in Taipei earlier this year) We just would like to get a few back in HK at some point because we’ve already distributed them all out.
E: that said, much more time to read and dilly dally around in a confined space, so I finally got to read your ‘eternal network’ paper more carefully, and i guess the main value i can take from this history is to see similar struggles and resonances resulting in similar impulses and tactics, the eternal network here being a kind of affinity ——
F: Yes, and I am also wondering whether these struggles, resonances and mistakes need to be constantly re-enacted and repeated by each new generation in order to be fully (i.e. not just in an abstract or disembodied manner) understood; and what could be gained from observing and analyzing both the historical repetitions and differences in those repetitions.
E:though i wonder if it changes anything or similar confines our mail art fandom into the realm of the marginal play… if whatever foresight those projects from the 60s forward have for internet behaviours today, and as you say our pinpointing of AI/algorithms as the evils of the system is misplaced, then how can these intimate and networked actions parasiting off of larger infrastructures really effect anything?
F: Maybe that’s the problem - that, by focusing on (larger societal) effects, we’re unintentionally superimposing growth or impact expectations on these projects while their main value might have been their subjective-collective experience, and functioning as an experiment? (Also in the sense of a radically open experiment with questionable ethical/political outcomes? For example, I was once struck to find the name of Jürgen Elsässer, nowadays the leading extreme right/conspirational/populist publisher in Germany, in a Mail Art anthology from the 1980s.)
E: perhaps this question is naïve and misplaced. anyhow, there are certain murky areas between centralisation and decentralisation that Display Distribute is certainly implicated in… You are right that ‘radical inclusivity’ does not necessarily garner any momentum, but neither do elitism and the reverse snobbery of oligarchic manoeuvring.
One question for you because i think you are much more up to date on internet speak than i am, what does getting ‘redpilled’ mean, re: below?
E: About the BBA newsletter, there’s no specific amount, because the ultimate goal is to bring them all back to Hong Kong. So whatever Yenting can bring (or not) is fine, they are quite lightweight, though they are big (A3) so it’s more a question of volume. Amy is not in Rotterdam right now though, she is away in Terschelling for the holidays, not sure when she will be back.
About Zines, nice that you are able to obtain a hard copy! We were actually in touch with them earlier this year about a contribution, the S.A.Z. text we wrote for AAA, which they quite liked but preferred to have a new, unpublished text, and we were unable to write a new commission at that time.
I did see the PDF of the HK piece, though, glad that something else from this side of the world made it in. Generally I would say there is a lot of fluidity between print/digital for makers here, although there is very little criticality about big tech/platform capitalism, unfortunately, so basically everything is on Google/Facebook.
(speaking of which, i’ve been wanting to ask you for quite a while but shy to, because it’s slightly critical, hehhehe… how is it that you with full-on awareness of these issues are still using a gmail account, i assume as your primary?)
F: Good question, with two simultaneous but somewhat inconsistent answers:
In fact, Amy and I have a longer shared history of co-organizing a series of ‘Crypto Parties’ at WORM in Rotterdam, informal gatherings where people could learn the basics of e-mail encryption and anonymous browsing. [The Crypto Party movement had been co-initiated by a former student of mine, Danja Vasiliev, and got some momentum after the Snowden disclosures in 2013.] Those events ended up being utter failures, because the technological complexity was too much for almost everyone who attended. Even simple things - such as using a local POP3/IMAP e-mail program such as Mozilla Thunderbird instead of a web mail service - weren’t graspable to many visitors (who, thanks to the paradigms introduced by iOS and Android, lacked a basic understanding of the difference between locally installed software and online services). The use of software like PGP/GPG, TOR and Trails went completely above the heads of participants. Amy was further traumatized by the presence of some esoteric/pre-Alt-Right nutcase conspiracy groups that a friend of mine (a former experimental filmmaker who converted to radical islam, and as consequence wouldn’t watch some of her own older films) had brought in.
My takeaway from this experience was that Crypto/privacy activism (of which I already had been a part in the late 1990s, back then as a PGP user and advocate) was well-meaning, but utterly naive because encryption technology can do more harm than good, and compromise people’s privacy even more than ‘regular’ Internet use, when incompetently used, or even with a slight bit of oversight.
Amy’s research and book on steganography came right out of the frustration with the Crypto Parties, and her desire to offer a more viable and enjoyable alternative to crypto software.
I’m taking the fatalistic stance that, if one gives up on hardcore encryption (PGP, TOR, trails), the rest doesn’t really matter any longer; there’s no privacy, everything will be data-mined by governments and corporations. For me personally, it only matters whether or not I am not dependent on a cloud provider but can store my data locally. I even post on Facebook, after using alternatives like diaspora and Mastodon amounted to the equivalent of talking into a void; my own principle is simply to use it like a blog and not share private information.
F: I’m sorry to write that there’s now uncertainty about HQL-364. Yenting needed to return home early than planned, on the 9th instead of the 19th, because of tightened quarantine and immigration policies in Taiwan and the uncertainty whether flights will be cancelled (after all flights from the UK to Taiwan got cancelled by the government). I wrote Amy asking her whether she may be back home before the 9th.
E: but thank you for the reminder, as i have to tell myself again and again in so many arenas, to focus upon ‘subjective-collective experience, and functioning as an experiment’, rather than the unintentional but hard to escape notions of ‘superimposing growth or impact expectations’, as you say…
F: Yes, but you could also criticize that as a petty-bourgeois hobbyist self-limitation that gives up on the larger picture… All the best, and my apologies for the logistical complications,
E: Re: e-mail… Uff, what you say depresses me so, the constant reminders that i will never be skilled enough to protect myself under surveillance capitalism, and perhaps my despise of Google is purely ornamental, in the least that i would prefer that the tools i rely upon so much everyday are not branded by the big G… but under the current situation, about 90% of the people i communicate with are on g-mail so most of my e-mail traffic ends up flowing through them anyway, which is highly annoying.
F: I can change e-mail providers for you, but admit that I’ve become incredibly cynical and skeptical, and basically don’t believe in anything anymore. For example, Protonmail could simply be a honeypot run by intelligence agencies, just as the Swiss ‘Crypto AG’ manufacturer of cryptography machines in the Cold War period (that was a front of the CIA and German BND):
E: I can see how conceding to g-mail 10 years ago would also have been a different decision than it would be today, but the behaviours that it has programmed over the last ten years may be fixed now, so in this particular way, one could say you still more attuned to the youthful dark forest futurism that the article speaks of than i am. I guess it is a question of how to play with what ‘assimilation’ really entails. Does it offer another kind of invisibility, in a sense?
Anyhow, thank you for offering a glimpse of one of Amy’s pasts to me, hehehe! It’s interesting to relate that back to the shift of her interests and approach…
F: At one point, those Crypto Parties had become somewhat scary, because a friend of mine brought a number of sectarian/crackpot conspiracy theorists (who probably now run part of the “Covid hoax” and QAnon protests), two of whom were interviewing me for their YouTube channel in one room while the rest of them were with Amy at the main Crypto Party, and she felt unsafe.
E: Anyhow, I think that privacy is not the only issue for me, though my other reasons perhaps only float in the realm of the decorative daily life activity which may have trouble translating into anything more transformatory. but I don’t want to believe there are real voids (the counter argument to that being exactly the dopamine-pushed kind of thing that propels GAFA), there must always be someone to listen, not if we keep talking, but if we learn to listen better/more…?
E: greetings from Guangzhou,
F: I miss the place, although my life there was limited to long teaching hours at GAFA, going to a student/artist-run space in a nearby village (that hadn’t been fully incorporated into Guangzhou yet), and taking frantic cab rides shortly before the end of business hours to Lvyin Rd. where I learned about the African-Chinese electronics trade.
F: Most of the zines from HQL-364 went back to Amy today. I’m enclosing my visual documentation of the transfer (a distance of 1.6km)