Nomad Technics: Context and Strategies of Chinese Media Art Experiments

摘要

New media experiment is today a field of intensive creativity thanks to the contribution of a younger generation of Chinese artists. This study investigates at the questions of embodied experience of art and asks what today's technoculture's turn to life might imply in the context of Chinese experimental media. The present study aims to enrich the language of such experiments by building on the scaffolds of theoretical concepts developed in the works of Deleuze, Heidegger, Braidotti and Zylinska to discuss how radical reconfiguration of the body might open up new possibilities of bio-techno constructs in which the body becomes a sensorial interface for technological codification and recodification. The present study will look at biophysical experiences such as in noise art performance as the radical starting point through which we might shed light on the importance of post-representational flow of mediated sensation in art making today.;In addition, the present study aims to raise the issue of the "technology" in contemporary culture beyond the limitation in everyday use of the term as something pertaining merely to technicality or instrumentality of things. As such, by relating the questions of the technology to bodily sensations and human desires, we might also stop seeing technological mediation and mediality as something pertaining merely to the "thingness" of the material objects that constitute our everyday knowledge about "new media" as a phenomena centered around concrete products and their functionalities. This study explores the illegal transgressions between heterogeneous constructs advocated by Deleuze to offer a possible narrative in which Chinese media experiments can be contextualized in its proper discourse of "intermediality" that goes beyond the series of entrenched dualisms such as sound vs. vision, technology vs. art, human vs. machine, organic vs. inorganic matters, etc. The present study attempts to show that anti-genealogical formations of "monstrous" bodies can be particularly useful to assist our intellectual conceptualization of the cultural logic today, both in relation the social reality of China as an emergent industrial power of rapid evolvement as well as the undercurrents of industrial progression that point to an increasingly mediated and automated world of bio-techno existence of life. Ultimately, the current study postulates on the becoming of a posthuman body that requires no less than a new bioethical approach to the very meaning of life. On this front, the willingness to engage such a complex issue demonstrates an example of which radical experiments in art community might continue as an indispensable force that leads 21 st century's intellectual explorations.