Dancing with the Tool: Considering Technologies in Playcourt and Negotiated Differences

For "Stakeholders," the Hong Kong presentation at the 58th Venice Biennale, artist Shirley Tse has created two interconnected installations that occupy the courtyard and indoor space respectively. Once visitors enter the courtyard, their gaze will fall on a constellation of sculptural forms standing tall on C-stands. Some of the sculptures are newly created, while others—Green Head, Jade Tongue, and Optic Nerves—are recycled from her solo exhibition "Lift Me Up So I Can See Better" (2016); they give away a sense of the bodily through their suggestive names and forms that conjure up human body parts, such as the round shape and almost real-life size of the head. Taken together, the varied parts in the new installation Playcourt fuse into a biomorphic whole, with the use of materials as heterogeneous as Styrofoam, bamboo, nephrite jade, zip ties, and thermoplastic radiotherapy mould. 

 

As visitors enter the unassuming interior of the Hong Kong pavilion, they are greeted by a creature made primarily of wood. It sprawls over the entire space; its never-ending limbs twist and writhe across the spatial compartments divided by brick walls. The wood varies in colour, texture, density, and grain, and it takes myriad cylindrical forms that are distinct from each other. Table leg, bowling pin, baseball bat, candlestick, prosthetic leg, rolling pin—each piece references a functional, handmade object but remains a mimicry devoid of function. One thing mutates into the next. Interest in the organic persists, but while in Tse’s earlier work biomorphic forms were often suggested by highly malleable plastics, this time, in Negotiated Differences, wood has replaced plastic as the protagonist. Plastic has been inextricably tied to Tse’s reputation as an artist. In her earlier works, she explored plastic extensively and almost exclusively as a signifier of contemporary culture. After focusing on plastic for a decade, the artist began to dilute its importance around 2006 by expanding her repertoire of materials to include glass, precious stones, metal, wood, and found objects. Yet up until this presentation, none of these materials has occupied centre stage. 

 

In the essay ‘Technology, Plastic, and Art’, written on the occasion of the Art and Technology Symposium organised by the University of California, Irvine, in 1998, Tse elaborated her thoughts on her use of plastic technology as the point of convergence of art and technology. The essay highlights the fact that the problematic of technology has always been one of her core concerns. In "Stakeholders", she has expanded her exploration of this question by tying together very different forms of technology. In the connectors that link up all the wooden parts in Negotiated Differences, one finds the recent technology of 3D printing. The connectors appear to be made of wood, but are in fact a mixture of wood and plastic. Moreover, the file used for 3D printing was not created by Tse, but is instead an open-source file she found online, and is seen by the artist as a found object of the twenty-first century. 

 

The oldest technology used is also found in the same work. To make the large variety of cylindrical forms, Tse only utilised one tool: a hand-operated lathe. As the majority of us are consumers who buy most of the products we use, we may not have seen or even heard of a lathe before, but it was in fact a commonly known tool across cultures and times from ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece and is still in use today. It is by definition a tool that produces truly round objects through a rotary motion. In some accounts, it is considered the mother of machine tools and played an important role in the Industrial Revolution, as it was used to make wheels for carts and parts for mills and pumps, as well as furniture and woodenware for eating and drinking.

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As we spoke in December 2018, the artist could hardly conceal her exhilaration when she talked about using the lathe: she described as ‘magical’ the moment when the machine turned a rectangular piece of wood into a round thing. For Tse, the appeal of the lathe stems principally from its ability to produce organic, unstackable forms. In order to understand this, it is useful to turn to Martin Heidegger, who was cited as an important reference in Tse's thinking about technology in her 1998 essay. Heidegger laid out his view on technology in the Bremen lectures (1949) and ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954). For him, the essence of technology lies not in certain procedures, machines, or innovations; rather it is a mode of ‘revealing’. Technological thinking reveals things to us as ‘standing reserve’ and renders the world into a stockpile of raw materials. ‘Everything encountered technologically is exploited for some technical use’, including ourselves. The danger of technology is that its essence prevents us from entering the realm where things can show themselves to us truthfully, in a manner not limited to the technological. 

 

With a hand-operated lathe, instead of a computer numerical control one that churns out precise forms that can readily enter systems of large-scale industrial production, Tse makes things with wood that cannot be stacked and stocked. Perhaps more importantly, she makes these things through machine-carving: a process that is less about control, and more like interaction or even a dance between the body and the machine. The object takes shape and reveals itself as a result of this concerted effort, not via technological thinking, and therefore it does not reveal itself as standing reserve for anything. In this way, the half-machine-made and half-handmade work can perhaps be described as trans-technological. Moreover, in her use of 3D printing and the lathe in the same work, Tse challenges the common misconception that technology refers solely to that which is digital, electronic, and ‘high-tech’. As a category, technology encompasses stone tools in the Palaeolithic period as well as state-of-the-art computers or rockets or AI robots, and therefore does not stand opposed to the primitive, archaic, and pre-modern. 

 

Perhaps the idea that technology implies the new is so prevalent largely because of the way technology is discussed in mass media: only new forms of technology interest commentators, who never tire of elaborating on their potentials and threats. In recent years, the danger of technology being used as a form of control by states and corporations is often brought up in discussions about mass surveillance, facial recognition, big data analysis, and data harvesting. For instance, China is said to be developing a Social Credit System that will place its nationals under an unprecedented level of control and discipline. One example on the corporate level is the Facebook privacy scandal that erupted in 2018 when it became apparent that the political consulting and strategic communication firm Cambridge Analytica was able to access the personal information of up to 87 million people, harvested by Facebook.

 

The third form of technology, found in Playcourt, is most pertinent to our current state of affairs when read against this background. Woven into two antique badminton rackets is the ground wire of two antennas that function as ham radio receivers. Depending on the weather condition, these antennas might pick up signals transmitted by amateur radio operators across the world. The development of radio communication systems began in the 1890s, largely thanks to the Italian inventor and winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics Guglielmo Marconi, who built on Heinrich Rudolf Hertz’s research on radio waves. Amateur radio came into being in the early days of this technology, and quickly became a popular hobby for many in Europe, North America, and Australia. However, the free use of radio waves ended soon, as amateur radio transmissions interfered with commercial and military radio systems. Following the sinking of the Titanic, the United States Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912, which restricted private stations to wavelengths of two hundred metres or shorter, and other countries soon followed suit. But amateur radio survived the restrictions that were put in place because of the challenges it posed to governments, and is considered to be a tool of resistance by radicals in many places. Its history speaks of a continuous process of struggle and negotiation between state control and the yearning for free expression and ways to communicate and connect beyond the watchful eye of the state. 

 

The inclusion of ham radio in Playcourt, which will most probably pick up signals intermittently and therefore add a completely unpredictable audio element to the work, adds to the idea of unpredictability and indeterminacy that sits at the core of both works. In our 2018 conversation, Tse emphasised this multiple times by speaking of the ‘non-predetermined process’, which functions as a self-imposed rule that limits the possibilities of the work. Because of this rule, she could not draw up a draft or a set of specifications and hand over production to fabricators, because that would mean she would have to decide on everything in advance of making. Instead, she wanted to allow the forms of the parts and the shape of the whole to emerge organically through making. This deliberate choice to make works by hand, rather than outsourcing production to fabricators, makes the works stand apart from contemporary sculpture under the influence of conceptual art, which foregrounds the concept of the final work over the process (and traces) of making. 

 

Tse has always used her hands to make work but she rarely employs expressionistic gestures; instead the movements are always mediated by the presence of some kind of machine. Here I would like to appropriate Norbert Elias’s idea, as put forth in his most famous work, The Civilising Process (1939/2000): that technologies are deeply tied to techniques of the body, to the ways in which people learn to use and relate to their own bodies. I would suggest that Tse’s constant retooling of her studio and retraining of herself according to the need of each project perpetually reform the way she relates to her own body. The artist has long stressed the concept of ‘plasticity’ as key to understanding her works to date. I also wonder if the concept has moulded her as a human being, into a ‘plastic’ creature with an unbounded capacity to learn new skills of making and to find new ways to relate to her body and the material world. The machines are her provisional prosthetics, and the artist is an evolving, mutating, generative cyborg. 

 

In the case of Negotiated Differences, the ‘non-predetermined process’ rule not only precluded the possibility of hiring fabricators; it manifests in the making process (as elaborated above), as well as the material and the form. In terms of form, the disparate parts connect to each other in a delicate and precarious fashion, extensions dependent on the other directly or indirectly connected parts. To be a coherent entity—and not succumb to the force of gravity and crumble—the parts need to literally negotiate their differences. Yet even this coexisting whole is temporary: it is a contingent solution put together by the artist and largely determined by the present space. In terms of material, one type of wood used is green unseasoned wood with high moisture content. Green wood is relatively soft and malleable, but it is also unstable and has a higher possibility of shrinkage. The inclusion of green wood obviously adds unpredictability to the already precarious work, in a way that serves to strengthen the work’s mode of being: not as a finite and finished object, but as an organic process of negotiation that begins in the conception of the work and experimentations with materials by the artist, but doesn’t end with the completion of the installation at the present location. Just like a game of badminton suggested in Playcourt—not as a competitive sport, but as played in Tse’s neighbourhood when she was growing up in Hong Kong—with no beginning or end, and can be restarted as soon as passers-by pick up the dormant rackets. 

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​(2019)