The Animistic and Open Aesthetics of Nature
By Jiang Yiwei
In 2018, Liu Jiayu completed her multimedia installation, "The SideValley" (2018), in the Vallée de Joux by collecting 6,400 photographs of the valley's sky and, through machine learning, generating entirely new images of the sky. The real-time wind speed and direction by the lake in the Jura Valley would trigger dynamic changes in these images. During the exhibition, the generated visuals were projected onto a pool of water on the gallery floor, allowing visitors to reach out and touch the water's surface. What makes this work so thought-provoking is Liu Jiayu's foundational method of "capture", much like the mechanical clocks of the 18th century that sought to capture the abstraction of time, transforming natural phenomena into digital information. However, what the algorithm ultimately produces is not a fixed computational result but somewhat random images of real nature itself.
Liu Jiayu's creative practice offers a distinctive perspective on both technology and nature. Unlike many artists who label their work with "technology", Jiayu, with her background in visual communication, has been accustomed to employing software and other technological tools since her educational years. In other words, she has never objectified or problematized "technology" as a concept. As a result, her works rarely exhibit the perceived tension between "humanities and technology" or critical reflection. Instead, her creations reveal an openness imbued with a sense of animism. For Jiayu, the sensory experience itself holds greater significance than technological aspects.
In 2014, Jiayu completed her graduation project "Within Invisibility (2014)", a work that collected real-time wind data from 40 cities across China. In 2017, she created her first digital projection piece, "The Riverside (2017)", by scanning the riverbed of a small stream flowing through the Great Wall in Beijing and transforming it into a 3D-printed sculpture, which was exhibited on the Thames River, with the stream's dynamic flow reflecting the changing patterns of sunlight and moonlight corresponding to Beijing time. The 2020 piece, "In the Flow (2020)", was even more awe-inspiring, as it was displayed on the rocky surface of a karst mountain in Yangshuo. The artist utilized drones to scan and create a 3D model of the 1,600-square-meter mountainside, then generated realistic water flow data on this model with specialized software. Her 2022 work, "Streaming Stillness (2022)", presented at the Venice Biennale, draws inspiration from the ancient Chinese map "Yu Gong" and takes the Helan Mountains as its starting point. By collecting extensive satellite data on Chinese mountain ranges, the artist employed machine learning to combine it with traditional Chinese landscape images, generating new landscape images and projecting them onto mountain sculptures within the exhibition space, offering viewers a unique and immersive experience.
Amid the rapid advancement of technology, the balance among sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and thought has been disrupted, with vision and knowledge that can be observed, read, calculated, or reasoned dominating the rational world. As Lewis Mumford emphasized, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the uniform progression of time harmonized with the perspective of space, as "the spatial measurement in painting and drawing reinforced the temporal measurement of clocks". Just as clocks captured time, the advent of the camera, capable of capturing images of the world, rendered the precise perspective that had disappeared in painting. Even within a confined space, the pictures a camera can capture are boundless. In the history of art prior to the 20th century, natural imagery predominantly featured human contemplation of landscapes or themes from natural history, reflecting the traditional visual arts' strong inclination towards the notion that "man is the measure of all things". By establishing and maintaining an unchanging standpoint for themselves, "man" could process information through instruments and rationality, allowing them to remain seated in their original position, observing and reflecting. Modern institutions of knowledge, such as libraries and art museums, strive to preserve this static relationship between humans and their subjects. Even disciplines that require movement, such as archaeology, biology, and geology, ultimately seek conclusions within the confines of the laboratory.
Climate anxiety, however, serves as a stark reminder that the container of "rationality" is none other than the mortal flesh of humanity itself. The nine-to-five workday, originally a rebellion against industrial time, now witnesses the resurgence of natural time with a vengeance, wielding the climate crisis as its formidable weapon. The potential consequences of this confrontation are profound, as Lu Xinghua aptly noted, "Humanity's fear of its own predicament does not stem from genuine concern for the actual crisis, but rather from the terrifying prospect of being compressed into a single species, forced to compete for survival alongside all others. Once the barrier separating humans from nature crumbles, mankind will find itself reduced to merely a species no different from frogs, tigers, birds, or mimosa plants in the natural world. This is what truly strikes terror into the human heart."
The climate crisis has prompted a reevaluation of visual centrism, highlighting the limitations of human auditory and olfactory senses, areas in which many mammals excel. Some believe that numerous animals communicate across species through channels of sound waves inaudible to the human ear, as exemplified by the ecological writer Lyall Watson, who witnessed a solitary matriarch of an elephant herd conversing with a blue whale on a cliff by the sea and said, "In infrasound, in music, they share big brains and long lives... female to female, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind."
Concurrently, extreme weather phenomena have emerged as a pivotal topic of discourse on Chinese social media platforms. At the 2022 Shenzhen Biennale, Liu Jiayu, with the support of Greenpeace, unveiled her thought-provoking installation "Another Side (2022)". Crafting karst cave sculptures from discarded materials from Shenzhen's manufacturing factories, she generated dynamic images based on Greenpeace's data on high temperatures and heavy rainfall in Shenzhen from 2008 to 2021.
In the realm of art, land art is undoubtedly the most intimately connected with ecological issues, as it serves as a reaction against urban aesthetics and the mechanisms of art galleries. However, many land art pieces are presented in sculptural forms, thus still falling within the concept of larger-scale, canvas-based works. Jiayu and her contemporaries, however, exhibit a reverse thinking to land art. Their works are displayed within the confines of urban gallery spaces, yet their materials are gathered through the relentless capture of scientific instruments, akin to how clocks capture time. This "capture", devoid of the arrogance of scientism, adopts an attitude of reverence towards nature. The images generated by algorithms, much like nature itself, are imbued with an unknowable quality in their computational process, yet they manifest power and aesthetic beauty. This group of new media artists, though following a path distinct from that of land art, ultimately converges in their profound yearning to express a deep commitment to the idea of an "open totality".
Reference
[1] Considérant, Victor. The Social Destiny. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2017, p.260.
[2] Mumford, Lewis. Selected Works of Lewis Mumford. Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 2010, pp.427–428.
[3] Engels, Friedrich. "A Ramble through Lombardy." In Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol . 41. Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2016, pp.184–185.
[4] Ibid., p.433.
[5] Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree. Beijing: CITIC Press Group, 2022.
[6] Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2023, pp.61–62.
[7] Lu, Xinghua. An Introduction to Art Exhibition. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2019, p.440.
Published in The Thinker, Issue No. 104, August 15, 2023.