The weekly knowledge sharing meeting is a tradition of the 5-month-old Shao Foundation. Held every Monday afternoon, it offers great opportunity for the Foundation members to exchange information and to enlarge our intellectual common ground. The meeting is conducted in a laid-back fashion, with no preconceived themes or topics. Everyone is encouraged to make presentation on subjects of his / her choice, including but not limited to the latest science and technology trend, academic discourse, personal eccentricities, social oddities, artsy chitchat, and global politics. Since we all have different training and background, the meeting often finds itself turning into a screaming contest. From now on, we are going to publish the nitty-gritty of every meeting on this blog as a way to aggregate and archive our collective brainpower.
Ou Ning started off this week’s meeting by showing us a gift he received last week called Nuanxin, a heart-shaped hot water bag designed and produced by Shi Chuan for the kids in the earthquake-struck area of Sichuan province.
Lawrence recommended Ian Buruma’s The Missionary and the Libertine, which ‘has a very tempting Table of Content, which contains a healthy amount of name-dropping that conjures up, for those who’s not completely uninformed about the subject, a decadent and fantastic vision of the East. (Mishima, Oshima Nagisa, Yoshimoto Banana, Satyajit Ray, etc.) The description of a Tenjo Sajiki theatre performance in Amsterdam in the early ‘70s gave me more excitement than many of the troupe’s leader Shuji Terayama’s own works (mostly film works, though) that I’ve experienced myself, and reignited my interest in this maverick figure who can probably be labelled a “proto-multimedia” artist.’
Pan He raised a few pretty serious questions in his trademarked esoteric language: How to document the mind of an artist? How shall we present or display an artist’s archive? What’s the relationship between artist and archive? ‘What should the archive of a specific artist consist of? Traditionally, it consists of sketches presented in the format of drawings and photos. Sometimes the artist’s journal can also be included. In a word, all the preliminary ideas filtered by the artist’s consciousness can be the potential candidates. However, as Henri Bergson has said, the origin of art is élan, which is consequently suppressed and effaced by the systematic consciousness. The question then is how to represent the énonce of origin in what Michel Foucault described as “the era of neo-archivism.”’
Zhang Ning made some pithy remarks on the state of China’s online banking system after having some negative experiences with Alipay, the most popular online payment platform in China. ‘With the World Wide Web expanding to ubiquity, e-commerce is also gaining popularity. The leading Chinese Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) website Taobao.com has reached an annual trading volume of 99.96 billion RMB. As more people begin to buy stuff online, the user experience of e-commerce sites is becoming more important to the consumers. The payment process is obviously one of the crucial part of this experience. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) used to dominate the browser market, but is nowadays considered to be the crappiest and most-easily-compromised browser that should retire immediately. On the other hand, there are more and more browsers that not only adhere to web standard, but also provide a safer and better online experience. Nonetheless, most online banking systems in China are still IE-only, despite the fact that the above-mentioned superior browsers are gaining momentum. Now even Taobao.com provides support for Firefox browser under Windows and Linux, and the Mac OS X support is in the pipeline. Under the circumstances, isn’t it stupid to claim “Firefox is less safe than IE” as an excuse of their laziness?’
Lastly, Yijing showed a short film from a design research project she’s involved with: Nike Kardia, and the meeting ended with a brief conversation about futurism research and designer’s role in creating the future. ‘Nike Kardia envisaged a future of the next 80 years—the largest migration of mankind—a migration into the cybernetic world. Assuming in future we will spend 90% of our time in second life, and 10% in physical life; we want our time in physical life to be exceptional. A group of six industrial designers and architect, Nike Kardia designed visions for future living. For more information please visit: Design Led Futures ‘07: Hello Cybernetics.’