Viewing northwest from the studio of Approach Architecture at Linked Hybrid, designed by Steven Holl Architects.

Viewing northeast from the studio.

Liang Jingyu, principal architect of Approach Architecture showing us one of their projects.

Christopher W. Mahoney and Na Wei from Elevation Workshop.

The meeting started. First of all, Ou Ning gave a brief introduction of the meeting’s background. It started as an internal staff meeting sharing information from our respective areas of expertise, and has later evolved into a learning platform for people from the outside as well.

Pan He from Shao Foundation presented us the history and the current condition of Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of the Congo. Pan focused on the ambivalent mentality of the Kinshasa people, a dilemma resulting from the colonialisation and anti-colonialisation in recent years. On the other hand, the differences between Kinshasa and the West in terms of values and lifestyle were mentioned. Pan’s presentation was an exploration of Kinshasa’s spiritual world, rather than the description of its physical reality. Is it problematic — or even hypocritical — for a third-party person to do this kind of exploration?

Liang Jingyu from Approach Architecture outlined four tentative possibilities for the organisation and curation of the Shenzhen Biennale: The Three Paths, Archaeology, Timeline and Virtual / Reality. The Three Paths is a proposal to mimic Shenzhen’s urban condition in miniature, where exhibitions are grouped broadly within ‘districts’ and further subdivided into ‘blocks’. Archaeology explores Shenzhen and issues of urbanity as if we are from the future and have discovered the remains of a city — an incomplete record of ruins, fossils, and remains. Timeline is envisaged as a spatially continuous exhibition that groups works in terms of date, including a ‘time machine’ that explores the ancient past and the distant future. Finally, Virtual / Reality explores the way in which technology pervades our everyday lives and shapes our cities, where exhibits alternate between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’, as a tapestry that blurs the distinction between them.

Lawrence gave a brief introduction of the futurist Adam Greenfield and his upcoming book The City is Here For You to Use. Set in a near-future world in which the vision described in Greenfield’s previous book Everyware is realised, the book deals with the imminent über-networked life from the perspective of urbanism. Greenfield coined the neologism ‘onto’ and ‘ontome’ as alternatives to Bruce Sterling’s ’spime’, all of which are used to refer to the context-awared and geo-locatable object of the next generation.

Hotzing Tone told us his current project of photographing single people’s living environment. ‘Although this is an abused subject matter, I still see potential in it. Maybe I can do it differently? I won’t know until I try. I used to be obsessed with conceptual works, but recently I have been thinking whether or not this is necessary. This current project is by no means conceptual, but you can see all my long-term concerns and experiences in the photos. Even if the end result is not satisfactory, I’m going to have a fun ride nevertheless!’ Then he continued and described a few other interesting projects and ideas of his, which triggered extensive discussions (which also touched upon other topics from the meeting).

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.’