VOP Issue 31: Technologic

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Amidst the frenzy of techno-developmentalism, following George Orwell’s famous thesis in 1984, does “Who controls technology controls the present” hold true?

This issue features three artists.─ Lu Yang’s video game-like CGI films depict a post-human automated world, with sentient and creative AI, and gamified simulated spaces, presenting an ongoing sci-fi bombardment and historical fantasy. Combining programming, signals, and electronic devices, Zheng Xianyu collects human behavior, emotions, and their relationship with machines, revealing the current state of existence enveloped by technology. The artist duo exonemo provokes people’s attachment to digital interfaces and technical images, picking up the mouse, screen, internet speed, computing, touch, and remote social interaction over which we have lost actual sovereignty.

In this issue’s featured articles, as mixed reality and the metaverse approach, Chen Jiao imagines our unavoidable digital avatars and footprints gradually becoming "metahumans" who constantly self-examine and self-monitor. Chen Wanyin analyzes the close yet subtle linkage between automation technology and governance, and from the technological errors caused by different processes of regional technological development, imagines the possible reshaping of technology. Gabriele de Seta investigates the "face-swapping" deepfake applications and cultural effects in China in recent years, exploring the various visual synthesis technologies produced by internet media companies and netizens' self-made memes, and the complex challenges they pose regarding creativity, privacy, regulation, and truth. Yan Wangyun reviews recent international media art festivals, surveying the global practices of composite image and time-based media art that explore data, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and sensing and recognition technologies.

This issue also includes interviews with philosophers Yuk Hui and Byung-Chul Han, who share their social observations on global technological centralization. Hui believes that now is the time to reverse the question—not to ask how technology will transform art, but how art can transform technology. He calls for the establishment of technodiversity, seeking solutions beyond realpolitik and addressing contemporary technological development by transforming the inherent connections between art, technology, and thought. Han, meanwhile, points out that "datasexual" people are entering a "non-thing" world, losing physical objects and their sensory perception. In the endless supply of rapid information and entertainment addiction in the digital comfort zone, digital capitalism exploits people's primal desires, just as Huxley foresaw in Brave New World—human pleasure is dominated by management. Han warns that this is our future.

In addition, in this issue, Li Lizhen reviews the "history of failures" in photography, from X-ray photography initially being considered spoiled photos to the "defects" of spots, scratches, and afterimages revealing the traces of chemical development, suggesting the photographic materiality's implicit potential for image innovation and information to be explored. Chen Chuanyang examines French photographer Auguste Salzmann's archaeological photography of Jerusalem in the mid-19th century, arguing for the tension between scientific documentation and artistic creation. Shi Weizhu reviews the film experiences of Taiwanese people during the Japanese colonial period from the 1920s to the 1930s, tracing the modern aspirations of Taiwan's first "movie fanatics." Li Weiyi explores how an American space flight audiovisual event that occurred in Taichung Park in 1963 subtly influenced the construction of local historical perception of Taiwanese military and culture during the Cold War era, and resonated remotely with American achievements.