Creeps, crabs & cyborgs wip (project trailer) (extended) poster

THEMES: western colonial sci-fi and how it relates to orientalist histories, cyberpunk and fetish, “optimisation” , MAD, (Model Autophagy Disorder),  becoming with as a way to nurture empathy, Machine unlearning (K Crawford), unplacibility to aid the reduction of surface, speculative ai, the glitch and it’s consumability by capitalist desires for system failure to further human god-complexes , post-humanism and hybrid ontologies, inter-species relations, the alien and the cyborg as tools for racial distanciation…

See some of the project research here.

Creeps, crabs & cyborgs wip (project trailer) (extended), 12 min 26 sec single channel with stereo sound.

Creeps, crabs & cyborgs wip (project trailer) (extended), is an experimental film that uses performance, script and found footage to investigate themes of western colonial sci-fi, optimisation, machine unlearning and post-humanist hybrid ontologies. The film is also considering, through its in-between structure – both part and whole - the relation between product marketing and artistic practice. The linear trajectory of the whole product concept is warped by the film’s desire to act as a constant becoming, an idea and fruition, a forever wip (work in progress).

It is also the name and theme of an upcoming book collection, curated in collaboration with Anarchafeminist Library, Amsterdam (Anarcha Feminist Group Amsterdam, Amsterdam Netherlands | radar.squat.net ) for their library; which will be used to host a series of events; readings, conversations and book clubs in the future months. Anarchafeminist Library is ran by members of the Anarcha Feminist Group, an anarchist, activist and intersectional community that stands against all forms of exploitation and oppression whilst creating spaces for growth, education and experimentation.

When horseshoe crab blood comes into contact with a toxin, it starts to clot.

Horseshoe crabs are bled alive. (their blood is bright blue)

They're pierced in the heart and drained for around eight minutes, which can deplete them of half their blood.

Then, after hours spent out of the water, they're allowed to just be dropped back in (www.npr.org). 

I don’t mention this is any moralistic terms. I am interested in the west’s scientific positioning of species deemed “alien” and its relation with western sci fi and the racialisation of ai technologies.

Anne Anlin Cheng’s inspects techno-orientalism considering her theory Ornamentalism. Cheng sees western sci fi’s commodification, objectification and exoticisation of East Asian culture as rooted in a long history of violence, fetishisation and colonisation over Asiatic femme bodies. Historical references of cold, synthetic and porcelain Asian women are directly connected to the west’s construction of the “cyborg”, which further emphasise the west’s positioning of East Asian futurity and technologies as fearful, enviable, disgusting and deeply othered.

Horseshoe crabs are lined up as if industrial machines used for secret military purposes, in a context referencing a laboratory, a factory, and a museum cabinet of curiosities all at the same time. There is something so banal, cold and accepting in the framing of their extraction for our biomedical advancements. In this way, the horseshoe crab becomes a model to investigate the many other nonhuman animals that are seemingly alien, distanciated, and abjected.(P. Gisler, M. Michael).

In 1910, Jack London (one of the most prolific and successful writers of the early 20th century) wrote The Unparalleled Invasion. In it he states, “The Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but a short distance when it found itself in a fathomless maze…There was no way to communicate Western ideas to the Chinese mind… They were mental aliens.”

MAD, (Model Autophagy Disorder), (futurism.com/) is when synthetic content is fed back to a generative AI model, can be thought as data inbreeding, leading to increasingly mutated, bland, and all-around bad outputs. A system that is eating it’s own images again and again. Eating it’s own images again and again.

Eating it’s own images again and again.

Kyoko, an AI from Ex-Machina (2014), made Asian and mute by genius tech bro Nathan; solely for his pleasure pursuits (fucking, dancing and sushi). With Kyoko, I want to talk about bio-orientalism, tenderness, defensiveness and the desires around constructing hyper-sexual ai’s with the ability to glitch out trauma. Kyoko’s character, along with other AIs of colour are silenced, fetishised, discarded and violently abused without any visible desire from the film to critique such perpetuated mistreatment of women of colour.

The layers and intersections of class, ability, race, gender and power, that establish some as subjects and others as technologies for their desires (Franny Choi), which in constant iteration, create dynamics that can be hard to critique or deconstruct. I am interested in the hidden and insidious impacts of pedestalling these perspectives in a white supremacist, western context. I explore the function of shame in the growth and preservation of such internalised beliefs, in the context of wider systematic oppressions.

Vinciane Despret explores ideas of secret agents and interagency. Despret considers how when we look at relations we don’t immediately understand, it’s important to be “becoming with them and (starting) from them” and challenge the humanist and Christian conceptions we may enliven them with. The crab becomes a lens of relation for the work. A hard defensive shell, protecting tender insides, moving sideways to reach their goal, exploring the different shells we inhabit to protect our vulnerabilities.

Often a critique of anti-Asian and orientalist frameworks has been countered through inhabiting the same tools of individual, ego-driven author that builds the oppression it is critiquing (Quinn Lester). I want to embrace ideas of infection, contagion, virus, and proliferation, as a precarious and valuable approach in our relations to bodies, the digital, new technologies and community. Through exploring viral language, that has often been associated with anti-Asian discrimination and policy (see Meat vs Rice - the Asian exclusion laws invoked by public health officials, Jack London's “The Unparalleled Invasion”, and more recently Trump’s “Chinese virus”), I aim to challenge and fuck with such pre-conceptions, an un-learning. For me, citation can behave as a virus, a means of growth and abundance. I cite my inspirations to resist neo-liberalist desires to separate, commodify and cut-off community. I want to reach out and stay connected. Though, I am aware of the risks of performing academia or “good taste” through the use of citation. I aim to resist entrenching classist issues of pedagogy by platforming fragmented, subjective and emotionally driven modes of research.

Creeps, crabs & cyborgs wip (project trailer) (extended), uses both filmed and found footage, pulling from a range of sources to think through the endless positionings on the subject matter. Peking opera during China’s Cultural Revolution being a site of profound artistic innovation available for all classes, whilst the regime simultaneously persecuted many elite artists and cultural workers, and how this history exists in the west. Images from haute couture - McQueen, Gautier, Yves Saint Laurent - to explore the trend in fashion to borrow from other cultures to create boundary breaking garments. Gianna Kim notes on appropriation of designer Yohji Yamamoto, that we need to understand consumption and “its ties to social and racial factors…The nuances of how we consume and interact with clothing need to be explored critically or it will consume us”. I layer pictures I’ve created on text-image ai, to explore data inbreeding and how generative these programs really are, seeing the results as both symbol and example of issues in our corrupted systems of information. I collage this over tiktoks, movie references, theory and personal performance experiments to highlight my flawed personhood and in-authority, trying to work things out and have start conversations.  

There is a psychological term called “crab bucket mentality”: the idea that when a singular crab is in a bucket it can somehow climb out to freedom, but when multiple crabs are in there, they will continuously pull each other down and none of them are able to escape. “Don’t be a crab” one might warn. I am wary of this theory; it seems to reveal more about human projections than any animal relations.