The New Normal Reading Club
The Review of ‘New Normal’ Reading Club
8 Weeks,
4 biweekly reading club sessions,
35 suggested materials,
participants from 8 different regions
Written by: Wendy Teo
(Borneo Laboratory)
A. Borneo Laboratory 2020 Annual Reading Club
‘If you want to make small changes, change the way you do things;
If you want to make big changes, change the way you see things.’ – Don Campbell
We always believe discussion with critical arguments can lead to a series of informed, organized, and positive changes. As an instrument of this belief, our reading club is a humble faculty for learning and sharing among eager minds.
In this unprecedented time during worldwide Covid-19 lockdowns, our reading club decided to cope with social distancing norms by organising 4 biweekly online theme-based discussions. Before the pandemic, this annual reading club was organised as a 3-4 day reading retreat, held in three remote, off-grid, wifi-less natural sites across one month. But this year, instead of the book specific format usually adopted in the book club, this reading club was a theme-based discussion gathering.
We suggested reading materials related to each provided topic biweekly, though the participants were encouraged to expand the landscape of arguments through exploring their own material, regardless of their format (books, magazines, journals, articles, podcasts, videos etc.)
Our reading club discussion format was inspired by Adler’s ‘horizontal relationship’, which is inclusive of different points of views and the channel by which diversified ideas are collected. Thus, we devised a horizontal discussion format in which we encouraged both verbal and written input through a collaborative text pad shared with our participants. In this way, those who preferred to share their thoughts verbally could turn on their mic for five minutes after our 5 minute period of silence, which attendees could use to consolidate and share their thoughts through typing on the collaborative text pad.
For those who were with us during the reading club sessions, we are thankful for your time, presence and your voice shared with us.
This review hopes to conclude and extend the conversation of our 2020 Borneo Laboratory Annual Reading club beyond our 8 week celebration of knowledge learning and sharing. In this review, the 8 discourse topics that were recurring throughout our 4 reading club sessions are highlighted. These multifaceted discourse topics reflected both the world we were in before the lock down and the world we could build towards in the new normal.
B. Discussion Highlights:
i) The Dictation of Nationalism in countering our Global Issues.
ii) From Climate Crisis to Climate Caste
iii) The Productivity Model that defines Our Condition and Identity
iv) Attention Psychology, Mechanism and Machine in the Divisive World
v) Shopping for Identity in the Society of Spectacle towards a Society of Extras- How much in us was suggested?
vi) Towards a Horizontal Community – Reviewing the ideas of Adler’s psychology, Horizontal Leadership and the attempts from Infotech
vii) Building Self Sustainability – Reviewing the ideas and attempts in Foodscape
vii) The Mission of Art in Our Time
1. The Dictation of Nationalism in countering our Global Issues.
‘The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a Christian planet.’ – Imagined community by Benedict Anderson
The ideology of ‘Free Trade’ system, first proposed in ‘the Wealth of Nations’ by Adam Smiths in 1776, suggested that the entire world would get richer through the ‘division of labour’. Under the free trade framework, nations speed up specialisation in their roles and mutually benefit from a network of shared resources. 7
‘Exploitation in a developed country is opportunity in a developing country.’ - Economist Paul Krugman on ‘New Trade Theory’. 9
But inequality arose when nations in a more advanced stage within the ‘Free Trade’ framework figured out they could organise their wealth through manoeuvring the balance of trade. They learned that they would be in a favourable position if they produced a limited set of products like fighter jets, microchips or automobiles, and export the low-cost labour work to other nations. The persisting inequality over the last few decades, created the monolithic paradigm in trading which most developing nations have been striving towards .
With GDP as a dominating economic metric of success, we have collectively upgraded our scale of production into a mass production system, to feed a market of mass consumerism backed by global demand. On the flip side, we collectively reduced our capacity for organising self-sustainability, due to our heavy reliance on the culture of outsourcing.
Impacts are felt globally, however, when the international distribution network is disrupted. One recent example is when agriculturally-focused nations decided to prioritise their respective national interest during tough times, contributing to a wide-spread disruption in food network during Covid 19 pandemic.
‘We now have a global ecology, a global economy and global science, but we are still stuck with only national politics. This mismatch prevents the political system frame effectively countering our main problems. To have effective politics, we must either de-globalise the ecology, the economy and the march of science—or we must globalise our politics. Since it is impossible to de-globalise the ecology and the march of science, and since the cost of de-globalising the economy would be prohibitive, the only real solution is to globalise politics.’ –- 21 Lessons for the 21st century by Yuval Noah Harrari
‘Nation states were the necessary political containers for nation sized economies. Today, the containers have not only sprung leaks, they have been made obsolete by their own success. First there is the growth within them of regional economics that have attained a scale once associated with national economy. Second, the world economy to which they gave rise has exploded in size and is taking on stage new forms. New global economy dominated by Great transnational corporation serviced by ramified banking and financial industry that operates at electronic speed. It breeds money and credits no nation can regulate. It moves towards transnational currencies – not a single ‘’world money’’ but a variety of currencies or ‘’meta- currencies’’, each based on a market basket of national currencies or commodities. It is torn by a world scale conflict between resource supplies and uses. It is riddles with shaky debt on a hitherto unimaginable scale. It is a mixed economy, with private capitalist and state socialist enterprising forming joint ventures and working side by side. Its ideology is globalism.’ - The Third Wave by Toffler Alvin
2. From Climate Crisis to Climate Caste
As mass consumerism synchronised with mass production, both have changed our natural environment drastically, especially where our relationship with nature has been overpowered by the economic narrative. In order to get high yield produce, the expected development is the widespread adoption of single crop farms and the usage of pesticides. As a result, our soil has lost its biodiversity to deforestation, chemical substances and over extraction in nutrients. ‘Our definition of success is an abuse of the natural environment.’ 4
Meanwhile, ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ suggests we are witnessing ‘the rise of the pandemics age’, in which wildfire, flooding, lighting strikes will fuel one another and lead to the loss of habitat, virus mutation and eventually pandemics. Along with political refugees, we will also witness a large surge in ‘climate refugees’ and ‘pandemic refugees’. 2
Climate refugees tend to be those who hold lower positions in the climate caste system. It is not possible to review the formation of a climate caste system without reviewing environmental justice, without which poorer communities will be less resilient to the climate crisis. But equally, we will also see that small, self-sustained community are more likely to survive than those big, outsourcing-reliant community or superstates, through sharing of skills and resources. 2
Our current climate narrative has yet to be a global one. We are faced either with the overly optimistic view which sees planetary migration as the ultimate path, or else with climate nihilism which has weaponised climate change by making it political. 2
We can foresee the number of climate refugees surging beyond that of political refugees in near future, but we are still not good at imagining ourselves becoming one. Currently for those in the undocumented boats parked near our sea border, we still refer them as ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘intruders’, ‘boat migrants’ or ‘refugees’.
Perhaps, the real question is not ‘How shall we be dealing with them? ‘, but ‘How do we want to be treated?’
That could be us.
3. Productivity Model that defines Our Condition and Identity
In terms of how our societal narrative transformed from a self-sufficient one to a market oriented one, Alvin Toffler gave an insightful analysis on our past, present and future, through periods of transformation he referred as the first to third waves. 21
In agriculturally-focused first wave societies, we are largely self-sufficient as the ultimate consumers of any production we committed to. Under such conditions, increasing production yield implies an increase of productivity by those involved, who tend to be drawn from biological lineage. As family is the same arena where people live their lives, perform their work and receive their education, it is also where the people subscribe a set of life values, moral systems and career goals. In first wave societies, therefore, family has a significant role in how men or women organise their lives. 21
In second wave societies, the market is regarded as the sole destination for anything we produce, and equally industrialisation becomes the sole process or goal for our production model. In the consensus that every unit of production can only realise its value in the market, the value of oneself becomes dependent on whether one can facilitate the massification of production and consumption. Second wave societies all share the features of ‘standardisation, maximisation, concentration, centralisation, specialisation, synchronisation’ across their narrative, followed by the emergence of metropolitan centres, mass production and mass consumerism. These features also extend their impact on us as humans and our interaction with others, making us the ‘most calculating mankind in history’. The second wave society is also a society divided into integratees (proletariat/precariat) and integrators (super elites). These super elites have been working hand in hand with our representative governments, which we call democracy, to decide the national interest and actions to achieve their market goal. 21
As Alvin Toffler described, the transition of second wave society into third wave society is inevitable due to ecological frustration, through an exponential course of advancements in the technosphere and infosphere. Counteracting the ‘resource wasteful, pollution producing system’ in second wave, a de-massified third wave society will be organised through a holistic, metabolic system which ensures the ‘outpost’ and ‘by products’ of each industry becomes an input for the next. As communication technology replaces commuting technology, staying at home is a sensible choice more than any time in the history. The appearance of third wave society will be similar to the first wave self-sustained society, where man or woman will be ‘prosumer’- producer and consumer of their respective demassified society. With the diversity they are exposed to through the infosphere, they no longer worship a monolithic paradigm in terms of jobsphere, sociosphere, technosphere, infosphere and politics. 21
In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has speeded up the de-massification of society. As the term ‘public realm’ becomes associated with danger, mankind is experiencing a societal experiment on an unprecedented scale in these months of lockdown. The pandemic has driven communities to re-structure themselves. Lock down, social distancing policy and mass unemployment force us to diligently explore the available technologies in organising our work, education, entertainment, market, and production. While automation and machine seem to be de facto solution for keeping our market productive, under such circumstances the replacement of human to machine seems to be a justifiable and organic one. 25
Knowing some jobs will lost to automation forever, 25 it is time to review the role of humans in future markets. ‘Human has two types of abilities, physical & cognitive. Previously, machine/robot can only mimic the physical one, but now with AI, algorithms and deep learning, machines can do a better job than humans in cognitive sense.’ Yuval also suggested, as it is foreseeable that machine will take up the producer role in the market, mankind might also lose their consumer’s role to companies setup by machine. In facing a generation with a ‘useless class (human) by 2050’, ‘what will safeguard their (human) physical survival and psychological well-being?’ 18
4. Attention Psychology, Mechanism and Machine in the Divisive World
'There is no doubt that our technological culture has ordered and separated the senses even more distinctly. Vision and hearing are now the privileged sociable senses, whereas the other three are considered as archaic sensory remnants with a merely private function, and they are usually suppressed by the code of culture. Only sensations such as the olfactory enjoyment of a meal, fragrance of flowers and responses to temperature are allowed to draw collective awareness in our ocular-centric and obsessively hygienic code of culture.
The dominance of vision over the other senses- and the consequent bias in cognition – has been observed by many philosophers. A collection of philosophical essays entitled Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision argues that ‘beginning with the ancient Greeks, Western culture has been dominated by an ocularcentric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision centred interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality. This thought-provoking book analyses ‘historical connections between vision and knowledge, vision and ontology, vision and power, vision and ethics’.
"The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world. The fact that the modernist idiom has not generally been able to penetrate the surface of popular taste and values seems to be due to its one-sided intellectual and visual emphasis; modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless." - The Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa
‘Thesis 19- The spectacle inherits the weakness in the Western philosophical project, which attempted to understand activity by means of the categories of vision, and it is based on the relentless development of the particular technical rationality that grew out of that form of thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone’s concrete life to a universe of speculation.’ – The Society of Spectacle by Guy Debord
Apart from defining how we perceive and conceive experience, our ocular-centric culture also defines the way we interact with others.
In the bestseller ‘‘How to make friends and influence others”, which has been widely mentioned across the landscape of motivational speakers, the Author Dale Carnegie, described that the key psychological goal of our interaction with others is to attain ‘Attention’, an idea that has inspired a few generations of entrepreneurs and businesses. Carnegie, candidly admits that the 2 key currencies of ‘Attention’ in his Freudian inspired idea are 1. Sexual drive, 2. The feeling of importance. 12
It is then not hard to imagine how some of the most intelligent members of our generation have spent their IT career specialising in ‘consumer technology’ or ‘persuasive technology’, in applying these 2 currencies of ‘attention’ in their content suggestion in order to keep people staying online for 2 extra minutes. 18
As a veteran of ‘customer technology’, developer and founder of ‘Time Well Spent’ technology, Tristan Harris explains ‘radical’ and ‘emotional’ content suggested from the side bar also has more likelihood to get click and consumption from the viewers. Passive users, as a result, might end up forming an extreme world view through that time-retaining content, which was created initially to retain consumer’s time.
This explains how we get a divisive world, in which each end is not aware of the presence of the other end, socially and politically.
5. Shopping for Identity in the Society of Spectacle towards a Society of Extras - How much in us was suggested?
‘The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.’ – The Society of Spectacle by Guy Debord
‘We live in a ‘Society of Spectacle’. Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real – that is interesting – to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media.’ – Regarding the pains of Others by Susan Sontag.
‘Society of Extras-
The society of the spectacle has been defined by Guy Debord as the historical moment when merchandise achieved “the total occupation of social life,” capital having reached “such a degree of accumulation” that it was turned into imagery. Today, we are in the further stage of spectacular development: the individual has shifted from a passive and purely repetitive status to the minimum activity dictated by market forces. So television consumption is shrinking in favor of video games; thus the spectacular hierarchy encourages “empty monads,” i.e. programless models and politicians; thus everyone sees themselves summoned to be famous for fifteen minutes, using a TV game, street poll, or news item as go-between. This is the reign of “Infamous Man,” whom Michel Foucault defined as the anonymous and “ordinary” individual suddenly put in the glare of media spotlights. Here we are summoned to turn into extras of the spectacle, having been regarded as its consumers. [….] So, after the consumer society, we can see the dawning of the society of extras where the individual develops as a part-time stand-in for freedom, signer and sealer of the public place. (113)’ – Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud
Identity shopping has become available since participation was made possible as the internet replaced TV as the major arena in which we perceive and conceive spectacles. ‘Like’ and ‘share’ has developed as part of the spectacle, designed as the token of consumption in the culture of spectacles which require the least effort.
As social media becomes the mainstream instrument for receiving and delivering information, it is also integrating information and feedback worldwide, which is integral to our development in socio-sphere. Data, as a manifold of information, preference, behaviour, inclination, or footprint becomes the indicator of our identity. With the help of consumer technology in keeping more of our time in the digital landscape, data companies get to build a better picture of ourselves through our clicked content and browsing pattern. From here, Yuval has suggested that humans are now ‘hackable’, and machine might end up knowing us more than we know ourselves. 18
Yuval’s suggestion implies a danger to our humanity if we are not discreet in leaving the trace of our data footprint. Our identity might even end up becoming a suggested one through the use of persuasive technology, for the benefit of an agenda beyond our awareness. 18
6. Towards a Horizontal Community – Reviewing the ideas of Adler’s psychology, Horizontal Leadership and the attempts from Infotech
‘All problems are interpersonal problems’; so Adler concluded through his psychological analysis of his case studies. From his finding, the origin of all these interpersonal problems can be traced as early as when ‘the parents placed their priority of choice, implant(ing) them in their child’. Children develop inferiority complexes when they feel that they are not catching up with the ‘standard’. They use likeability as a metric of growth along the course of identity building, ending up by subscribing to a monolithic standard of living, values and a belief system that were prescribed to them. 13
‘Freedom is to accept that you will be disliked by others.’ Adler suggested the courage to be happy is to own the courage to be disliked, possible through an awareness of ‘the separation of tasks’. According to his explanation, we should realise that how people think of you is their task (Task A), and you cannot do anything about it. Meanwhile your task is to live your life without focusing on being liked (Task B). Only through this awareness, your growth and the connection you built along the way, will be intrinsically yours. This also explained the reason why Adler’s psychological approach tends to be referred as ‘Individual psychology’, and the ideology in any collective is to realise a horizontal community that is inclusive of everything, including our ‘unattainable self’ with the past and future. 13
In opposition to the hierarchical community which an ‘Attention’ seeking societal narrative tends to end up with, a horizontal community celebrates more diversified types of role models. This diversity can be achieved organically if individuals in the horizontal community ‘live earnestly, love earnestly’, and are aware that ‘they are part of the community, not the centre of it’. 13
‘The truth is we cannot come out of the crisis with the same business models as we entered it with.’ PR specialist Robert Philips reviewed the disintegration between businesses model (what they do) and the message advertising campaign (how they want to be seen). Our society is in urgent need of ‘horizontal leadership’, that ‘people join in for the common cause instead of the lead & follow model could be found in vertical leadership. In opposition to vertical leadership, horizontal leadership (public leadership) enables progressive corporations through 1. being Activist, 2. Co-producing with people, 3. Citizen centric, 4. Society first. 14
In Yvon Chouinard’s ‘Good Business’, building business with good ‘flow’ means having a well maintained ‘psychological capital’. Through the ‘psychological capital’, more refined skills can be developed, full understanding can be achieved, deeper relationships developed, and quality of life improved, among anyone associated with the company. 11
Chouinard also suggested a good business, is the one developed with a long-term vision and a sense of stewardship. He referred to Patagonia by saying: ‘You cannot build something like this if you’re going to go public in three years and cash out and walk away. So we really do try to act like this company is going to be here a hundred years from now.’ 11
With a democratic system as the political paradigm, we live under the culture of political representation in which we collectively vote for a representative who can potentially disregard our political wish list. This is why we still find riots and protests taking place in democratic society, despite there being political procedures provided as an instrument of policy change. 22
‘We are 21st-century citizens, doing our very, very best to interact with 19th century-designed institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th century. Let's have a look at some of the characteristics of this system. First of all, it's designed for an information technology that's over 500 years old. And the best possible system that could be designed for it is one where the few make daily decisions in the name of the many. And the many get to vote once every couple of years. In the second place, the costs of participating in this system are incredibly high. You either have to have a fair bit of money and influence, or you have to devote your entire life to politics. You have to become a party member and slowly start working up the ranks until maybe, one day, you'll get to sit at a table where a decision is being made. And last but not least, the language of the system — it's incredibly cryptic. It's done for lawyers, by lawyers, and no one else can understand. So, it's a system where we can choose our authorities, but we are completely left out on how those authorities reach their decisions. So, in a day where a new information technology allows us to participate globally in any conversation, our barriers of information are completely lowered and we can, more than ever before, express our desires and our concerns. Our political system remains the same for the past 200 years and expects us to be contented with being simply passive recipients of a monologue. So, it's really not surprising that this kind of system is only able to produce two kinds of results: silence or noise.’ – Pia Mancini
The growing failures in the representative political system, has provoked some tech savvy activists and social reformers to think even more daringly about upgrading our democratic system. Cesar Hidalgo suggested in his Ted talk that, through the help of big data and AI, we can train our data algorithm by feeding them our preferences and beliefs to represent us politically.
‘So what would the Jacquard loom version of this idea look like? It would be a very simple system. Imagine a system that you log in and you create your avatar, and then you're going to start training your avatar. So you can provide your avatar with your reading habits, or connect it to your social media, or you can connect it to other data, for example by taking psychological tests. And the nice thing about this is that there's no deception. You are not providing data to communicate with your friends and family that then gets used in a political system. You are providing data to a system that is designed to be used to make political decisions on your behalf. Then you take that data and you choose a training algorithm, because it's an open marketplace in which different people can submit different algorithms to predict how you're going to vote, based on the data you have provided. And the system is open, so nobody controls the algorithms; there are algorithms that become more popular and others that become less popular. Eventually, you can audit the system. You can see how your avatar is working. If you like it, you can leave it on autopilot. If you want to be a little more controlling, you can actually choose that they ask you every time they're going to make a decision, or you can be anywhere in between. One of the reasons why we use democracy so little may be because democracy has a very bad user interface. And if we improve the user interface of democracy, we might be able to use it more.
… So I want to invite you to think about the bigger ideas. The questions I just showed you are little ideas because they are questions about how this would not work. The big ideas are ideas of: What else can you do with this if this would happen to work? And one of those ideas is, well, who writes the laws? In the beginning, we could have the avatars that we already have, voting on laws that are written by the senators or politicians that we already have. But if this were to work, you could write an algorithm that could try to write a law that would get a certain percentage of approval, and you could reverse the process. Now, you might think that this idea is ludicrous and we should not do it, but you cannot deny that it's an idea that is only possible in a world in which direct democracy and software agents are a viable form of participation. ‘- Cesar Hidalgo
7. Building Self Sustainability – Reviewing the attempts in Foodscape
Zi, a co-founder of an organic farming social enterprise raised during our reading club discussion: ‘The food problem today is a distribution problem not so much a production problem. Yet all the metrics used today with regards to food only measures tonnage, in other words production, and by doing so, it suggests that any methods used to maximise production can be justified, even at the expense of the consumer’s health and environment.’
‘One third of the food we mass produced for the market went to waste and loss annually.’ (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nation)
This is when the idea of de-massified food production becomes valid in suggesting that the decentralisation of producer and consumer will help building resilience in the ecosystem of our food production, especially during global crises when the distribution network is being disrupted. 21
‘’you would have to eat eight oranges today to get an equivalent amount of vitamins that your grandparents would have enjoyed from a single orange in their youth…’’ 4
Apart from strengthening the resilience to cope with tough times, de-massified food production is also a way to deal with the problems derived from our current mass-produced food system. For years, our mass-produced agricultural system has been relying heavily on the single crop approach and genetically modified organism (GMO) technology to achieve high yield production, which is taking a toll on our natural environment and our health. 2, 3
‘The moment we change the genetic series of the tomato; we are creating a new virus that we never encountered before.’ Mark Shepard in his book ‘Restorative Agriculture’ explained how a virus mutates itself through coping with genetic codes of species, and how the GM food species we have created for the mass consumerism market might make virus mutation get out of hand. 3 One of the likely consequences is epidemic, which may aggravate into a pandemic due to the loss of biodiversity in our natural environment. 2
Including farming as part of our life helps re-structuring our living into an eco-friendlier and healthier one. 1. Food-composting will remodel the way we deal with our waste and help nature to speed up its decomposition. 2. Lower our reliance on mass-produced farming product will helps lands which previously deployed as single crop production to restore themselves. 3 3. Having more control over the way we grow our food, will help us taking back the control over our nutrient intake.
In addition, food growing has also proven itself as an instrument to grow meaningful communities. For instance, the Gangsta Garden organised by Ron Finley in the food desert of Southern L.A., Malaysia based Folo edible garden community that receives 3 tonnes of food waste every day for its compost (FOLO official website, Chivas video), Edible Schoolyard initiatives that started by ‘Farm to Table’ founder Alice Waters that encourages kids to learn from food growing, since ‘food is the powerful teacher’.
8. The Mission of Art in Our Time
To date (2020 June), we witnessed art councils around the world restructuring their funding policy towards art as an emergency package to sustain artists through pandemic. In return, artists are encouraged to digitise their works or make their work accessible online.
When the metric of success of art is reduced to click, like and share, it is perhaps valid to question how and what kind of art produced nowadays can truly participate or disrupt the societal narrative in a meaningful way. In the last reading club session [The Role of Art], we reviewed how some ambitious artistic endeavours changed our mass consciousness over our ecological sphere or socio-sphere through art interventions, as included together with this article.
From there, we reviewed arguments on the mission of art from various perspective. Should art be a pleasure, in the sense of visual aesthetic, a contextually meaningful correspondence, or a safe haven of transdisciplinary experimentation?
From Dave Hickey’s ‘Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty’, it is ‘the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder, and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the question of efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence.’
From Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, the artwork shall be ‘judged on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.’ Nicolas Bourriaud also analysed the Relational Aesthetics through ‘Co-existence criterion’, in which ‘All works of art produce a model of sociability, which transposes reality or might be conveyed in it. So, there is a question we are entitled to ask in front of any aesthetic production: ‘’Does this work permit me to enter into dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?’’ A form is more or less democratic. May I simply remind you, for the record, that the forms produced by the art of totalitarian regimes are peremptory and closed in on themselves (particularly through their stress on symmetry). Otherwise put, they do not give the viewer a chance to complement them.
‘As today’s consumer, media and information culture increasingly manipulate the human mind through thematised environments, commercial conditioning and benumbing entertainment, art has mission to defend the autonomy of individual experience and provide an existential ground for the human condition. One of the primary tasks of art is to safeguard the authenticity and independence of human experience…Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function,’ Italo Calvino states. ‘The grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various ‘’codes’’ into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.’- The Thinking hand by Juhani Pallasmaa
Or as Robert Filliou suggested, art should be safe haven for transdisciplinary experimentation: ‘Nowadays, art is not defined as a place that imports methods and concepts, a zone of forms of hybridisation. As one of the driving spirits behind the Fluxus movement, Robert Filliou said that art offers an immediate ‘right of asylum’ to deviant practices which cannot find their place in their natural bed. So many forceful works of the last three decades only arrived in the realm of art for the simple reason that they had reached a limit in other realms.’
Following are art projects around the world that have participated in societal narratives, suggested by participants during the reading club session:
i. Sweeping River- Datong Dazhang:
ii. China Avant garde Exhibition Archive:
https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/1989-chinaavant-garde-exhibition
iii. ZKM- Critical Zones, virtual exhibition:
https://critical-zones.zkm.de/#!/
iv. Tilted Arc by Richard Serra:
v. Cooking in Pressure-Bakudapan Indonesia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=ZLr4Ld2rK4o
vi. Concerning Migrant Worker through Drama by Centre of Applied Theatre of Taiwan:
https://www.facebook.com/Concerning.Migrant.Worker.through.Drama/
vii. Poo Machine at MONA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InmrF-7xCvo
viii. Waterlicht by Daan Roosegaarde:
https://www.archdaily.com/631925/dutch-artist-transforms-amsterdam-s-museumplein-with-waterlicht
ix. Locus Apichatpong Weerasethakul –Cao Guimaraes: https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/exhibition/locus-apichatpong-weerasethakul-%E2%80%93-cao-guimar%C3%A3es
x. Space Shuttle in the Garden by Petrit Halilaj:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpJnc5O5eCE
xi. The Atlas Group by Walid Raad:
https://www.theatlasgroup1989.org/
C. Suggested Material List
1. Feral, by George Monbiot
2. The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace Well
3. Restoration Agriculture, by Mark Shepard
4. Dirt to Soil, by Gabe Brown
5. The World is Flat, by Thomas L Friedman
6. Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
7. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smiths
8. Factfulness, by Hans Rosling
9. Masterclass -workbook by Paul Krugman
10. Recession, Hyperinflation, and Stagflation by Crash Course (Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHw4NStQsT8&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtPNZwz5_o_5uirJ8gQXnhEO&t=0s
11. Good Business, by Yvon Chouinard
12. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
13. The courage to be disliked, by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi
14. Trust me, PR is dead by Robert Philips
15. One straw revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka
16. Edible Schoolyard Project, by Alice Waters (Website)
17. Homodeus, by Yuval Noah Harari
18. 21 Lesson for the 21st Century, by Yuval Noah Harari
19. What Money cannot buy, by Michael Sander
20. Imagined Community, by Benedict Anderson
21. The Third Wave, by Alvin Toffler
22. How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era, TedGlobal 2014 Talk by Pia Mancini
https://www.ted.com/…/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_…
23. Coding the Government by Jennifer Pahlka, Ted Global 2012
https://www.ted.com/…/jennifer_pahlka_coding_a_better_gover…
24. A Bold Idea to Replace Politician
https://www.ted.com/…/cesar_hidalgo_a_bold_idea_…/transcript
25. Covid-19 could accelerate the robot takeover of human jobs, by Erika Hayasaki https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/17/1003328/covid-19-could-accelerate-the-robot-takeover-of-human-jobs/
26. The Eye of the Skin, by Juhani Pallasmaa
27. The Thinking Hand, by Juhani Pallasmaa
28. Relational Aesthetics, by Nicolas Bourriaud
29. Art in Context, by Goethe Institut
30. Marina Abromovic (Artist)
31. Christo and Jeanne Claude (Artist)
32. Agnes Denes (Artist)
33. Hsieh De Tsing (Artist)
34. What should we expect from art in the next few years/decades? And what is art, anyway?, by Carmen Salas
https://medium.com/@CarmenSP/what-should-we-expect-from-art-in-the-next-few-years-decades-and-what-is-art-anyway-be9f75c3d1ae#:~:text=%2C%20Manhattan%2C%201982.-,What%20should%20we%20expect%20from,the%20next%20few%20years%2Fdecades%3F&text=Art%20is%20intimacy%20and%20inspiration,it%20comes%20in%20contact%20with.
35. Learning from the Inclusive, Community-Led Processes of Toride Art Project, by Kirin Heng
D. Attendees and Contributors of the Reading Club
Our discussion could be viewed through Links below:
Reading Club Session 1 - [Living]: http://meetingwords.com/IErVBanwSi
Reading Club Session 2 - [Exchange]: http://meetingwords.com/7yNL94MeKX
Reading Club Session 3 - [Community]: http://meetingwords.com/XWGQvOpv4f
Reading Club Session 4 - [The Role of Art]: http://meetingwords.com/01WVYarqom
1. William Khoo
2. Irene Huo
3. Hong Yu Si
4. XinYi Cao
5. Eugene Chin
6. JiaoYue Zhao
7. Yusara Zulkifli
8. Realrich Sjarief
9. Claudwie
10. Eugene Goh
11. Toni Giddings
12. Kee
13. Zi Chan
14. Francis Goh
15. Suryani Senja Alias
16. Clara Soltau
17. Chin Kuan Wei
18. Phyllis Law
19. JauTung Wu
20. Zhi Kai Wan
21. Yuqi Huang
22. Yoke Pin
23. Mustapha Kamal
24. Lian Da
25. Razak Aziz
26. Clarissa Lim
27. Kenya Endo
28. Wei Ling
29. Florence Lambert
