#Roman is a mix of Ai and her producer

[dallina17]

I am obsessed with the song Idol of Yoasobi (again) and now I am imagining an Idol AU of Neo based on Oshi no Ko. First, I want to clarify that this is not a RWBY as Oshi no Ko characters. I am taking some elements of Oshi no Ko and Neo is somewhat based on Ai's story, but more oriented to her motivations and feelings than... well, the whole having babies at 16 years and dying at 20's.

There is some death and trauma thou.

With that being said, lets start!

Neo was born the daughter of Carmel and Jimmy Vanille, Trivia Vanille. From a young age, it was clear she wasn't able to speak, something her parents always hated her for.

Her mother worked with Lil Miss Malachite on Malachite's productions. The daughters of Lil Miss, Melanie and Miltia, were child stars, and Jimmy and Carmel wanted Trivia to be a child star too but "how can she be a star if she isn't able to speak?". And, as if that wasn't enough, she had heterochromia that her parents forced her to hide with brown contact lenses.

Another person that worked with Malachite was his right-hand Roman Torchwick, who organized the films, series, music groups, and even sometimes had to babysit the little monsters called Melanie and Miltia.

Because Trivia couldn't be the star they wanted, her parents cast her aside and never showed her any form of love. She didn't have any friends in school and when she was accompanying her mother to the productions, Miltia and Melanie used to bully her.

This led to Trivia never knowing what it was to be loved or what it was to love someone.

Trivia desired to be a star. An idol like the ones she heard, maybe if she was, then her parents would start to love her. But how could she be one if she wasn't able to talk not to say sing?

Despite that, she was very good at dancing! And sometimes she read the scripts of films and pretended to be many characters, saying the dialogue with sign language. She was very skilled but no one noticed.

Until someone did.

Roman was told to keep an eye on Trivia, but unlike Melanie and Miltia that were two demons disguised as humans, Trivia was always calm, obedient, and sweet. They didn't have much interaction, but he had some fondness for her and soon noticed her talents being wasted.

One day, he told Lil Miss to include Trivia in one movie. It took some time, but, because she wasn't going to play any major role, she agreed. Carmel was even more reluctant, but ended up saying yes due to her boss asking it.

Trivia didn't know what to think. All her life she had been told she couldn't be a star because of her muteness. Her parents hated her for that. And now she was going to act in a movie? What if she messed this up? What if they hated her even more? Roman noticed her nervousness and told her she had nothing to be afraid of. He gave Trivia the courage she needed and she did an amazing performance.

The movie was a success, and a lot of people talked about the little mute girl who added more fright to a movie already terrific.

Trivia was happy with her performance and soon started to play in more series and films. Always minor roles, but it was enough, for once in her life she was appreciated, even if it came from strangers she didn't know and never from her parents. She was told that she was loved. If only she knew what it meant, if she could only feel it.

Roman took her as his apprentice, and they started getting together more and more. With time, Trivia spent more time in Roman's house than she did on her own. He taught her everything he knew, and the two of them became very close. He always congratulated Trivia, and she always felt happy when being around him. Comfortable. Appreciated in a way she never felt with her parents.

Roman adored the girl. She always listened to him and took his advice to heart. She was fun to be around, they shared meals, pretended to play music together, he even learned sign language to communicate with her better. Still, he never showed her how much he loved her.

Because like Trivia, he didn't know the meaning of love. He grew on an orphanage, abandoned by his mother. Never knowing what it was to feel loved and to love someone.

What if he said "I love you" and it was a lie? One he knew a lot of famous people said to please their fans? One he told Trivia it was okay to say?

He saw her dancing to the songs of the famous group STRQ, Trivia's favorite. Roman knew that she had nothing to envy from them, Trivia was skilled and talented, one of a kind. If she were to be an idol, she would be the best one the world had seen. So he proposed it to her.

Trivia thought he had lost his mind.

Trivia, signing: Me? An idol? That's not possible. It's one thing to act in minor roles but, being in a group? You know I am not able to speak. How would I even sing?

Roman: There is plenty of technology. I am sure you would find some gadget to make a synthetic voice. Besides, your muteness would make you unique, think about it "The idol who made her way through music despite her muteness"

Trivia, signing: ...Even if that is true, I sure wouldn't be able to love fans, and sure they wouldn't love me. Idols are people who say I love you to the fans and so on, but if I said that I would be lying. When people say they loved my performance is okay, I don't have to answer. But as an idol...

Roman: So what's the problem? Lying is okay. In fact, pretty lies is what the fans want. Lying is a talent, you know? Is okay, lie as much as you want.

Trivia, signing: Would it really be okay? It's okay if I said "I love you" even if it's a lie?

Roman: Yes. And you do want to love people, do you not? You just don't know how. If you sing and dance, that's a way to love fans. If you become an idol, your songs will be full of love words. Besides, the more you say you love them, the lie can become true.

Trivia deeply thought about it. Being an Idol was something she had forgotten a long time ago. Could she really become one? She loved to dance, she had never been able to sing, but what if Roman was right? What if she found a way? And to feel loved, to be able to love, if she became an idol, would she finally understand what it meant?

Finally, she agreed to Roman's proposal. The two of them made a deal: He would start his own company, and when Trivia was sixteen, she with other teenagers would form an idol group. Until that, she would practice to become the best idol she could.

Everything was perfect. For once, in her ten years of living, Trivia was able to dream of a bright future in the entertainment industry. She would become the idol she always dreamed of. And Roman would be by his side, Roman, the one she could trust, Roman, the one who had always supported her, Roman, the one thing she appreciated in a world she hated.

But the dream never was accomplished.

The day of her eleventh birthday she decided to spend it with Roman. Her parents made clear they had no time for a celebration, and she didn't mind, not anymore. The two were about to have lunch when the bell rang.

Roman opened the door. Someone stabbed him. Roman felt. The assassin tried to go against Trivia. They were about to stab her too when Roman took out his gun, shot, and killed them. Trivia called the ambulance, but it was too late.

His last moments Roman spend them hugging Trivia, was she okay? Was she not hurt? Ah. How glad was that he had taken her under his wing, taught her everything he could. All his life had been miserable, but she brought him a bright happiness he had never had before. She was going to become an idol right? How he wished he could be with her, guide her, see what kind of adult she would become. See her being the star he always knew she was. She might be Jimmy and Carmel's child, but she was like a daughter to him. His precious star.

He still had something to say to her before passing away. He hugged her more, placed a hand over her cheek, and said:

"Trivia, I love you"

He felt relief. He had been able to say it. That wasn't a lie. He loved her, he always had. He went in peace.

But Trivia was heartbroken. The only one that made her feel something positive, the only one who cared about her was gone. She wanted to kill the one who did it, but that person was already gone.

Or not?

From there I don't really know how the story goes. I know that Roman had a testament where he left everything he had to Trivia, she deduces that he knew someone was after him, and also realizes that the one who killed Roman was a hired assassin, so there is someone pulling the strings who wanted Roman death, and she decides that she will find them and kill them in vengeance.

He was a loner like her, so his only contacts were with the people he worked it. The people of the entertainment industry, so the person she was looking for had to belong there. If she wanted to find them, she had to be at the core of the entertainment industry.

So she decides to still become an idol, but this time not for knowing the meaning of love, but to find the real killer. She spent the next four years practicing and becoming skilled at dancing, she even got a gadget to emulate a voice for the singing part. Her parents were against that dream, so she decided that not even they would stop her revenge.

So she ran away, dyed half of her hair pink, stopped using contact lenses, and started living in the house that once belonged to Roman. She changed her name to Neopolitan. One year later, when she was sixteen, Evernight Studios were searching for four candidates to form an idol group. Evernight was one of the world's most famous if not the most famous company. If she got in, she would have it much easier to achieve her goal.

So she auditioned. Maybe her skills were not perfect, but everyone could see she was one of a kind. She wasn't only beautiful, but her mismatched eyes and hair drove attention everywhere. With her in the group, success was guaranteed. The only condition that the boss, Salem, put her, was that she had to pretend to have a voice all the time, she couldn't just use the gadget for singing, she had to use it all the time

Neo wasn't very happy with the idea, but if that was what was needed to accomplish her revenge, so be it. That was her first lie, the first of many.

She formed a group with Emerald, Mercury, and Cinder, and the four of them started their path to becoming stars.

From then I know even less. I don't know who send the assassin to kill Roman, but I know he left a letter for Neo that she finds after a long time, that made her realize he loved her, something that she forgot after all that time for being obsessed with her revenge. This helps her realize she had loved him too, even if she didn't know it at the moment.

Yang is the secret child of Raven and Tai, Ruby is the secret child of Summer and Tai. Summer is killed because of the same person that wanted Roman dead, an assassination attempt is what made Raven leave and disappear from the map.

Weiss's father has his own company, but Weiss chooses to join Ozpin's because she hates her dad and forms an idol group with Ruby, Blake, and Yang called RWBY.

Neo eventually reveals the secret of her voice and accepts her disability with pride.

The one pulling the strings tries to kill Cinder too, but she survives with half of her face burnt and without an arm. Neo saves her because she is not losing another person she loves to that psycho.

And of course, Neo's first "I love you" goes to her most dear friends, Emerald, Mercury, and Cinder.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Art Ain’t A Mirror, It’s A Hammer (Part 2 of 3)

From 1972 to 1975, the artist now known as Jeffrey Catherine Jones drew a one-page comic strip for National Lampoon entitled “Idyl.”

To call “Idyl” enigmatic would be far too clinically precise a term.

As Jones famously explained, “I kept handing them a hole, waiting for them to ask for a donut to go along with it.”

Recently I got on a Waiting For Godot kick and began tracking down various performances online.

Waiting For Godot is Samuel Beckett’s famous theater-of-the-absurd play.  Unlike Eugène Ionesco’s equally famous and equally absurd Rhinoceros, Beckett’s play lacks anything that might remotely be considered a story.

Ironically, this helps explain the play’s popularity.  It’s easy to mount on stage, it’s crammed with amusing incidents and bits of business that actors delight in hamming up, and there’s no pesky plot to keep track of.

It means nothing -- and such was Beckett’s intent.

This does not preclude audiences from trying to attach as much meaning to it as possible.

The most common interpretation is a religious allegory, with the never seen character Godot simply a roman a clef for God.

Yeah, could be.

But it’s open to numerous other interpretations as well, and the various performances I’ve seen range all the way from tragic existential angst to low brow knockabout Laurel & Hardy style comedy (Stan & Ollie being acknowledged inspiration for the work).

So which is current?

There’s a certain post-modern / quantum mechanics feel to Waiting For Godot.  Beckett offers no meaning the audience can react to, they must supply their own.

The result is an infinity of possible interpretations, because as in the quantum universe, the moment one observes something, one collapses all the myriad other possibilities of what it could be into a single concrete thing -- none of which prevents the next observer from collapsing it into something entirely different.

In a way it is very much anti-art.

While art (in the conventional sense) usually implies a creator with a specific meaning or message attempting to pass this along to their audience, Beckett forgoes that.

To paraphrase the Firesign Theatre, he might as well say, “In this world, you’re on your own.”

But as Quant demonstrated (and oh, how deliciously ironic her name is in this context), what the artist means, what they intend is not necessarily what the audience will derive from it.

Art becomes art not when the artist creates it, but only when the audience perceives it, be they one or one billion.

. . .

Which drags us -- kicking and screaming -- to the matter of AI “art”.

Despite its presumptive name, AI is not Artificial Intelligence.

Rather, it’s a very clever technology that can analyze existing human creativity and combine it in unexpected ways.

In principle it’s no different than Musikalisches Würfelspiel, the old German dice game where random throws set precomposed music into various different arrangements.

While one could argue the individual movements contain meaning since they came from human creativity, the final arrangement as a whole does not because it’s only a random assemblage of bits and pieces.

“But, Buzz,” you say, “don’t humans mix & match / cut & past / downright plagiarize as well?”

Yup, we sure do.

For a reason.

We blend different ideas together with intent to produce a new synthesis, something that takes divergent concepts and produces something new from it.

We steal, but with a purpose.

AI doesn’t do that, and arguably may never do it.

As Gertrude Stein once observed, “There’s no there there.”

AI no more produces art than nature does (and obviously by art we include all forms of traditionally human creativity).

Nature produces incredibly beautiful things, but we as humans bring the beauty to what we see or hear by our judgment.

Nature provides no meaning, it simply is.  We can enjoy the fresh smell of a field of flowers, the dazzling colors of a sunset, the songs of birds but ultimately they are just particles and energy.

The beauty we attach to them comes from within us.

What marks human art -- good / bad / indifferent -- apart from nature is that we create with a purpose, to communicate some idea or emotion we value.

There were sunsets on earth for billions of years before the first eyes evolved.  Without someone to see them, how could they be beautiful?

And yet when someone paints a picture or even takes a snapshot of a sunset, they are attempting to communicate to others what they find beautiful and awe inspiring.

If they store it in a file they never open again, is it really art without an audience?

 © Buzz Dixon

[welcometomy20s]

August 8, 2022

#582 - News 39 (Mitchie M) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-08-04, Upload Date: 15-05-03

It is upsetting that Mitchie M’s other song doesn’t get as many views, because they are quite fun. Not that this isn’t. This is fantastic and the song itself definitely points to the more absurd songs from his later songs, and the structure is quite involved.

#583 - Record Red (shr) [Kagamine Rin]

Achievement Date: 20-08-13, Upload Date: 12-04-20

A Daisho roman song, both in the progression and lyrics, although with a distinctly synth house song. The combination works very well, the synths fit the almost circus-like vaudeville sound of a big band sound that points to the Daisho era. Very good. 

#584 - Autophagy (Hiiragi Kirai) [flower]

Achievement Date: 20-08-14, Upload Date: 19-08-19

Yes, this is Hiiragi Kirai’s introduction, although his rise to fame comes next. The dark jazz with growly flower tuning makes for a good mix and ha ha ha ha hello is certainly a good hook. I believe this is the start of a ‘series’ of a similar format.

#585 - Bocca della Verità (Hiiragi Kirai) [flower]

Achievement Date: 20-08-17, Upload Date: 20-04-26

I I I I hate you, and you are hooked. Simple and strong theme and tight structure brings this song over the top. It’s been a long time since we had a ‘World is Mine’ girlboss song and the piano break is one of the memorable breaks in VOCALOID history. 

#586 - One of Repetition (Nekomushi) [Kagamine Rin]

Achievement Date: 20-08-27, Upload Date: 11-11-12

As I said before, it is ‘one of repetition’ so there will be another repeat! While Miku’s version is more direct, Rin is more coy about the regret, which is a nice touch.

#587 - Puzzle (KuwagataP) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-09-06, Upload Date: 09-09-05

The mix of synth beats and rock brings a distinctive taste to KuwagataP of this about picking up the pieces and leaving with a smile, kind of. The song really does feel like somewhere between early era and golden era of VOCALOIDs.

#588 - Vocalo Colosseum (DIVELA) [Kagamine Rin]

Achievement Date: 20-09-06, Upload Date: 18-08-05

Yep, COMPASS song bringing another great producer onto this list, although they were there before. Very much fits the colosseum with heavy drums and the dramatic strings. The quick pace makes the song don’t overwelcome its stay, which is good. 

#589 - Blessed Messiah and the Tower of AI (HitoshizukuP, Yama) 

[Miku, KAITO, MEIKO, IA, MAYU, Gakupo, GUMI, Luka, Rin, Len]

Achievement Date: 20-09-11, Upload Date: 16-07-20

I think one of the most ambitious work TeamOS has ever done and it shows. Probably was one of the crown jewels of the triumphant year for VOCALOID, and not much else. A truly epic song that contains its story in five minutes with 10 voices? Kami… 

#590 - Villain (Teniwoha) [flower]

Achievement Date: 20-09-13, Upload Date: 20-02-17

One of the four songs that shaped 2020, and a fantastic return of Teniwoha into spotlight, with a very different and modern sound from his previous two entries. Lyrics about sex minority brought a lot of relations to fans from all over the world.

#591 - Koibito no Rangge (Hachi) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-09-15, Upload Date: 09-12-19

Yes, we have some Hachi songs to go… I know you think they all went over the top when he went major, but there are still plenty in the gas. A creepy song about a girl and her clone, probably? It’s a Hachi song, so it’s a bit hard to decipher.

#592 - Dance Orchestra! (YASUHIRO) [IA]

Achievement Date: 20-09-18, Upload Date: 16-04-23

Very much different from the typical brooding song, although IA makes it a bit bittersweet. If it weren’t for IA, one could probably mistake this for an OSTER Project song, but the PV is your typical YASUHIRO B&W PV. A fun diversion.

#593 - Jitter Doll (niki) [Lily]

Achievement Date: 20-09-18, Upload Date: 12-02-25

Start of a really good action RPG game… okay, not really, but it does sound like it. Really good use of Lily's mechanical voice, and a nice mix of niki’s two major styles, sometimes synth-heavy and other times ballad-heavy. One of his best works.

#594 - Ruma (Kairiki Bear) [Hatsune Miku]

Achievement Date: 20-09-25, Upload Date: 19-11-23

Song given to Rinu, a famous TG utaite, and one of few songs without such a dark theme, although it really is about leaving your worries behind. Perhaps with such a light theme and the wolf-like themes makes for a really fun and adorable song.

[sparklyjojos]

CARNIVAL DAY recaps [8/13]

Today’s recap: Ghostly investigations, the Ultra Evil Really Bad Guys in an awkward Mexican standoff with Slightly Less Bad Guys, and XX’s thoughts on writing.

--

FORTY-FIVE

14 Jun 1997 — 20 Jun 1997

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

--

The writer detective XX wrote a few stories (including the seppuku detective one) that would be put together in one book. The work would be published under the name “Seiryoin Ryusui” and—on Yasha’s request—called 19box in memory of Juku, whose DOLL nickname was Jukebox. [19box or Juke Box is an actual book by Seiryoin that indeed contains the seppuku detective story.]

On June 6th, Yuiga Dokuson fled JDC leaving a confession about being the Billion Killer. It’s now been three weeks since his escape and still no new confirmed Billion Killer cases have happened. The Crime Olympics still continue, but at least everyone knows they will be over in two months.

--

All stories influence people, for better or for worse, and the story with the biggest, sharpest impact is the news. Then again, even entertainment has a major impact on people. The pen is mightier than the sword; the story is the strongest weapon. [Insert a horrible pun about how kakuheiki, “written weapon”, is as strong as kakuheiki, “nuclear weapon”.]

--

(...when Hikimiya Yuuya had been working with the AI Desert Colosseum in February, he found an unbelievable secret file.

Below is Hikimiya Yuuya’s testimony. [Originally in first person.])

Once Hikimiya got out of shock upon seeing the different numbers of daily deaths, he instantly went to the hospital to talk with Frau D (or at least went there as fast as he could in a wheelchair). Frau D only told him to show the file to DOLL’s leader Madame Alpha to get answers.

Madame said she hadn’t seen this particular file before, but she had known all along that the UN numbers were faked. Good thing Hikimiya didn’t tell anyone else about it—if he did, he’d probably be disappeared on his way back to DOLL. He accidentally got mixed into a matter bigger than just the UN; a shadow organization was at play here, and one misspoken sentence could possibly doom the human race.

Madame then told Hikimiya what her Zero Reasoning actually was. The Japanese word for “zero”, rei, happens to sound exactly like the word for “soul”. Madame’s ability was seeing and talking to ghosts. The difficult part of her reasoning was discerning whether or not the ghosts were telling her the truth.

Other people would find it hard to believe, but Madame knew best that the souls who helped her solve cases were certainly real. She purposefully stayed away from other people, as anyone being too close to her for a long time would also start seeing ghosts, including those who had died in less than pretty manners. Several people even landed in the hospital from shock.

The ability wasn’t perfect. Madame would have a problem talking to souls who spoke different languages. The world of ghosts was also pretty complicated and consisted of more than just nice, well-behaved souls (but it’d take too long to explain everything now). Thanks to her powers, Madame knew better than anyone how drastically the known history changed throughout the ages, true events replaced with fake stories so different from what the souls told her about their times. She was also aware that knowing the truth was not always a good thing.

Using her ability as a sort of a soul information network, Madame was able to learn many things about the Crime Olympics.

They say that Christopher Columbus kept two journals out of fear of being deemed insane by his crewmates: a fake one that everyone else could read freely, and a secret one talking about his true goals. The death count data files similarly used two kinds of information. The true one (what Hikimiya found) allowed the UN to grasp the real situation, and the fake one (the official stats) were displayed to the common man.

To explain why that was necessary, Madame told Hikimiya about the Cosmic Bomb—the Moon. The Bomb was set to fall on August 10th, but it wasn’t impossible that the enemy would drop it earlier if they felt threatened. It was in the world’s best interest to not interfere too much in their plans—to make them think four million people really died each day—before a good way to counter the Cosmic Bomb was established.

As for how Frau D got his hands on secret data, Madame thought the reason was very simple: Frau D was one of RISE’s Dogs, probably responsible for leaking info from DOLL.

Right after this conversation, Hikimiya returned to the hospital for more answers. Frau D stated that Madame was smart enough to understand how to stay alive by keeping quiet. He confirmed that he was a Dog. However, the secret file was not meant for RISE at all, but for Hikimiya. That’s why the password was YUYA, and why the report was addressed to “Desert Colosseum”—once Hikimiya inherited the AI, he would become the next “Desert Colosseum”. The signature D meant Frau D and referred to his identity as a Dog (all of them are designated as D-[numbers], for example Frau is D-159837).

Hikimiya felt like there was something strange about Frau D’s demeanor during that conversation, and only realized a few days later—after the Crystal Nightmare—that the S-detective knew he would be killed soon.

But that wasn’t the last Hikimiya heard from Frau D, as Madame passed him a message from his soul. It was strange hearing Frau D so unusually serious (even if the words came from Madame’s mouth).

Frau D wanted to apologize. The whole “I love you” thing was just another one of his jokes, and he chose Hikimiya solely on the basis of his skills and ability to become the next Desert Colosseum. Thanks to Madame, he was never afraid of death. Aside from RISE, he also belonged to the suicidal sect of DICE, who were the ones to kill him in the end. “Desert Colosseum” was still indispensable to RISE—and that meant they would rely on whatever data Hikimiya would send them in the future.

After relaying the message, Madame commented that Frau D was actually a really serious man; you don’t become an S-detective by acting like a clown. She could speak with him easily so soon after his death, but making contact would get progressively harder with time, so Hikimiya should better become “Desert Colosseum” as soon as possible while he could still get ghostly tips.

It was the first time Hikimiya truly felt respect for Frau D. Though now that he thought about it, maybe even earlier he felt a sort of a strange, begrudging affinity.

On the day Frau D died, news came about Juku, Ronely Queen and Ushiwaka Gigolo. Juku’s death was especially hard on Hikimiya, considering they had worked as partners in the past. Then Firannu Meirunesia died a week later.

Hikimiya of course wanted to talk with the dead detectives, but Madame was so busy with all the cases she had no time to spare, and calling specific souls was hard—her work was mostly just waiting until someone with the right information came to her. Asked about Ryuuguu Jounosuke, she said that she’s sorry, but from what she could see he really was dead. At least she was able to assure Hikimiya that Otohime was still alive, held prisoner by RISE together with Amagi Hyouma and Tsukumo Nemu.

The day Frau D was killed, Hikimiya found a new entry in the database that belonged to a fake F-detective, “Flower Design”. [At least I think that’s the right romanization for that]. Frau must have made that fake detective so Hikimiya could hide behind the identity and obtain information safely. It was hard to work a double job as both “Hikimiya Yuuya” and “Flower Design” behind the scenes, but the exhausting training under Frau turned out to have been a blessing in disguise.

Hikimiya analyzed the death count reports (which by this point reached early March) and found that while in the big picture the number of deaths rose steadily, it actually came in waves. Doing some statistical magic, Hikimiya realized that the death rate usually fell a bit during weekdays, but then rose significantly on each Sunday—right after the Billion Killer cases. Step back, two steps forward… It’s like the Billion Killer served as a periodic impulse that kept the Crime Olympics going. The Crystal Nightmare caused an especially high rise in victims, too.

Hikimiya made some calculations. The numbers were at first much lower than the proclaimed “four million deaths a day”, but if the growth continued, it would lead to a bigger overall number of deaths.

Constant four million a day would give 1,4 billion total deaths in an entire year.

But if the numbers continued to rise, the final figure would instead be 3,7 billion, more than half the world’s population—assuming the Cosmic Bomb wouldn’t kill everyone else.

--

FORTY-SIX

21 Jun 1997 — 27 Jun 1997

MOHENJO-DARO

--

(It was once thought that alchemy could produce homunculi in bottles.

Black Rook is a human obtained through cloning, a three years younger identical twin of Ryuuguu Jounosuke, with whom he shared this name. Yearning for an identity of his own, Black called himself Ryuuou.

RISE had the cloning technology long before his birth, but didn’t see a reason to use it, as getting normal imposters was much easier. They say that everyone has at least three perfect look-alikes in the world—RISE had no problem finding those three with their omnipresent reach.

The truth is that the original Jounosuke was supposed to become Black Rook at first, but RISE made a critical mistake while raising him. In the end, the clone achieved what the original couldn’t and became Black Rook.

Below is Black Rook’s testimony. [Originally in first person. As expected, he might be… biased.])

From what Black heard, his older brother had travelled all over the world with their parents as a young child in order to naturally pick up native accents of many languages. He was successful at this goal, but in the process he became so used to the outside world that he couldn’t stand the dim closed spaces of the Sanctuary (which was back then still under construction), even showing signs of serious childhood claustrophobia. He was constantly upset and kept crying no matter how long RISE tried getting him used to his new life. Childhood claustrophobia sometimes vanished with age, but there was no guarantee it would happen.

In the face of this, the Doctor decided to start anew and cloned the boy, and so Black was born. To avoid past mistakes, RISE made sure he got used to the Sanctuary since birth, the fortress transporting him to all those different countries and essentially becoming his home. Staying in the Sanctuary instead of with foreigners led to him not quite reaching the language mastery of his brother, but the difference was marginal and didn’t really matter.

When RS became the leader of RISE in 1987, Black formally inherited the position of the Sanctuary’s Master from his father Kintarou. Similarly, Endou Naoto became the next Doctor / White Rook after his father Naomasa.

RISE continued to fight their long battle. Black didn’t really understand if there was an objective good or wrong, but he knew for sure that the Beasts wanted to destroy the human race, and RISE’s Gods wanted it to continue in whatever shape. A battle between good and evil.

Their greatest enemy was a secret group called Akutou 666 Rengou (lit. “the 666 villains union”), known in short as Akuren. It was much older than RISE and had been threatening humanity for thousands of years.

Akuren was a worldwide information network created by the 666 most evil people of the world, all their names written down on a secret Luck Black List. Aside from the top 666, there were also two lower “replacement groups”, each also counting 666 members, so 1998 in all. Those who died or were arrested would be erased from the list, though one could always get on it again later. Note that the first group members were too skilled to be eliminated from the list unless they died.

All the historical villains one may have heard of—like Nero, Catherine de’ Medici, Ivan the Terrible, Rasputin, Aleister Crowley, even Hitler—all reached no higher than the second group of Akuren. Those in the first group are all untraceable and take care to erase their pasts, only their horrible impact on the world hinting at their existence, their true nature that of pure evil beyond imagination (Black doesn’t even want to think about the stories he heard).

Akuren categorizes all people on Earth into thirteen tiers of evil, starting from 1 (those unwittingly doing everyday evil), going through those who commit crimes as part of a company policy or “usual” criminals (4-5), through famous organized crime (6), through those with political power (7), through country elites with even more influence (8), through secret organizations ruling those elites (9), through the evil that controls the history of humanity (10), the first group of Akuren (11), the few members of Akuren that have transcended the concept of pure evil (12), and the “ultimate organization of extreme pure evil” (13).

Upstanding citizens are classified as tier 1 (it’s impossible to be lower, as every single human eventually hurts another human, if only by existing). Tier 10 would include Akuren’s first group and half of the second group, together 999 people. Tier 11 would apply only to the first group; they’re so strong that an S-detective could maybe manage one or two of them at once, but not several, and certainly not 666. Tier 12 are those from the first group that aim for even more evil and want to throw the world into darkness. Tier 13 is so secret that even RISE can’t get any information about it, more suspecting their presence than knowing for sure.

The members of every group of Akuren are numbered from 001 to 666, with those numbers moving if someone falls off the list. Number 001 is always the person who stayed in a group the longest, while those from lower groups will enter a higher group starting from 666. Groups two and three have to provide information for the network, but those who already rose to group one are privileged and can simply get data without having to give any in exchange.

Akuren attempted to wipe out the human race many times before, their crimes usually showing as wars on the surface. The Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian War, Alexander the Great’s conquest, the Seven Years’ War, the Hundred Years’ War, various Prussia wars, the Russo-Japanese War, both World Wars, the Cold War…

After WWII, the 12th tier of evil first showed itself, possibly with the 13th one right behind them, and the most serious plan to destroy humanity (including themselves) had been in progress ever since. Their twisted reasoning is basically, “everyone has to die one day, and when I die, the world may as well not exist for me, so why not bring everyone else down with me while we’re at it”.

The current Crime Olympics were conceived as yet another of Akuren’s plans to destroy humanity. RISE was created to gain control over this plan in order to prevent the ultimate tragedy and limit the damage as much as possible. Of course on the surface they still had to act like they’re cooperating with Akuren, and so had to put the Crime Olympics into motion like they were supposed to.

Akuren acted like they didn’t notice their true enemy, but considering the quality of their information network, they had to already know about RISE’s goals. However, RISE was too useful to get rid of it so quickly. Fifty years of preparations passed in a pretend cooperation between the two organizations. RISE has three trump cards in their deck: Alive, the Billion Killer, and the Cosmic Bomb.

RISE’s true goal was purging evil at the root for the sake of humanity’s survival. If they left Akuren alive, it would just lead to another attempt at total destruction in the future. RISE had already succeeded at using the Crime Olympics to kill the lesser ranks of evil in droves, even though it cost a lot of other lives and the true malicious elites were still staying safely hidden. If RISE didn’t kill off those elites before August 10th, the Cosmic Bomb would fall.

Those “worst of the worst” were called Pure Ultimate Beasts. The purest evil often wore the masks of saints; they truly were beasts disguised as humans, creatures that would kill with a smile. The first group of Akuren was too careful to be easily led into a trap, so RISE had to start with eliminating the lower groups and make their way up.

All the above was a very rushed explanation, but the gist of it is that humanity is in a horrible spot. If they don’t do anything, the Cosmic Bomb will fall; if they try to fight openly, perhaps the Bomb will just fall faster. The fate of humanity is in the hands of RISE—of Black Rook.

...but Black feels a bit weird those days, like something is very wrong with him. Perhaps it’s just a lingering symptom of Alive... or perhaps he’d been caught into Akuren’s trap? Something feels wrong. With the Sanctuary, with RISE and with himself. Something is strange. He’s supposed to stop the Cosmic Bomb, and has been for sure making preparations, but now he can’t remember how to do it, as if he simply forgot something so important. He can’t remember… What the hell happened to him? What the hell is going on? It’s like he’s not himself.

Has he also been brainwashed…?

[End of testimony.]

--

Writer detective XX continues to write. He feels a strange compulsion to do it, a sense of mission, almost like someone is forcing him to write. Sometimes he wonders if he hasn’t been brainwashed.

--

FORTY-SEVEN

28 Jun 1997 — 04 Jul 1997

HONG KONG

--

Writing as “Seiryoin Ryusui” is weird to XX, like wearing someone else’s clothes. He’s been feeling like he isn’t truly himself. But if it’s so weird to him, why does he simultaneously have the compulsion to not just continue writing, but to write as “Seiryoin Ryusui” specifically? Nothing else changed. It’s just that whenever he works as “Seiryoin”, he ceases to be himself. Almost like someone else is guiding his hands, like he’s only the first reader instead of the writer.

Inugami Yasha wants XX to write a book about the Crime Olympic as soon as possible. Yasha’s plan is to use the power of stories positively, to light up at least some of the darkness surrounding them.

No one is faster to rise to fame in mass media than the worst criminals caught red-handed. “Seiryoin Ryusui” wasn’t that popular, but his name is still spread around because of the Cosmic Jokers case, so releasing a book under the same name will gather the world’s attention. This will possibly allow them to lure out the actual mysterious “Seiryoin Ryusui”. The book will be technically fiction, just like Cosmic and Joker, but will give readers enough clues that maybe someone solves the still unfinished mysteries, or gets to the actual truth behind something that has been considered solved.

To be honest, XX hates the writing style in Cosmic and Joker. It just seems bad and unbalanced to him. Strong J Outa the editor thinks it’s because XX has a similar writing style, so reading “Seiryoin” feels to him like reading his own old works, which is rarely a good experience for a writer. The important thing is keeping that unbalanced style while writing about the Crime Olympics.

Languages, just like anything else created by people, aren’t perfect. No matter how much one tries, a recording of events will never be perfect specifically because of the nature of words. Even non-fiction is fiction in the end. Words on their own aren’t the truth, but the moment someone encounters someone else’s words, they may read out the truth between the lines—which is what Yasha hopes for by releasing the Crime Olympics book.

(By the way, it’s been a month since Dokuson disappeared, and not a single Billion Killer case has happened in the meanwhile. There were giant cases happening at 1 PM local time on Saturdays, true, but no symbolic skull has been found.)

XX still can’t get rid of his strange feelings. It’s almost like there’s someone else within him, “the true writer”, perhaps even “the true culprit”. Strong J Outa dismisses these worries and says that in a sense, the mystery writer is always the real culprit manipulating the characters. A mystery novel is not as much a showdown between a detective and a murderer, as a showdown between the writer and the reader. The challenge is not just solving a mystery, but also solving the writer’s intent put in his work.

The idea of the writer as the culprit is sort of a taboo that everyone knows about, but that isn’t really relevant inside mystery novels by design. All fiction is real as far as the world within that fiction is concerned. There’s no reason to escape into delusions about a writer making all this happen; instead XX should focus on writing and fighting crime this way.

19box is set to be finally released on July 5th.

--

(And in the latest news...)

On June 14th, the entire island of Tasmania suddenly moves towards mainland Australia and smashes into it, resulting in 100,000 dead or injured and several small islands sinking. Right afterwards Tasmania returns to its proper place. How all this happened is a mystery.

On June 21st, about a hundred tourists visiting Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan are found naked and dead. The cause of death is unknown, but the incident is thought to have been influenced by the Carnival Dice cult.

On June 28th, all the power lines of Hong Kong are suddenly cut, leading to a complete power outage. Massive fires start in the aftermath. Giant playing cards are found around the place, so the group F4C is suspected. The situation becomes so bad it leads to political shifts and Hong Kong being completely returned to China.

--

On July 5th, a mysterious continent surfaces from the depths of the Pacific, so unimaginably huge that it takes half the ocean’s area. The continent’s sudden movement causes kilometer-tall tsunamis to rush towards other lands. It’s only a matter of time until the record waves reach the shores and destroy anything in their path.

Japan has twelve hours to prepare for the wave.

--

[>>>NEXT PART>>>]

[scratchface]

96!

I'll have to add screenshots to this later, because right now I'm on mobile.

Seeing Faust and Genome hanging out in the hotdog truck… yeah, I don’t even know how to feel about that, and it's not anything I ever expected to see. Especially with them talking about atoning for their crimes. With almost all the LI victims now in peril, with only the last victim still standing and Revolver to save them, it makes sense that they would feel that this is their chance to actually help the kids. I don't exactly approve, nor do I think this makes up for what they did, but at least they're trying, I guess.

I enjoyed lots of things about this episode. Vrains did some really fun things with the flower background. The petal rain was cute. I'm glad we're finally seeing some more interesting backdrops for duels, which is something they've sadly underutilized so far for a show that takes place in virtual reality. (But…What was with that spinning shot. Whose idea was that.) That back and forth between Ai and Bohman was actually pretty funny, and lots of great shots of Rev.

As for the big reveal, well, it's all very interesting. Kogami treated the Ignis as a singular entity in his calculations, blatantly ignoring that he himself gave them the capacity to act as individuals. Because of this he severely miscalculated the problem and led the Knights of Hanoi on a wild quest of extermination. Had he known only one Ignis was "the problem", would he have made a different decision? Or would he have come up with a more targeted method to deal with Lightning, and let the other Ignis go?

This also really shows how futile Kogami's actions after their creation were, how out of proportion he took things.

Self-fulfilling prophecy is something we've brought up before in regards to Kogami and the Ignis, how his actions led to them seeing humans as a potential threat, but now we see that Lightning also takes after him. True to his Roman/Greco theme, Lightning put them on that "fated" path despite wanting to resist the future he saw. What Revolver was getting at, by bringing up free will, was that even though Lightning did all these simulations, and should have had the free will to choose another path that didn’t lead them all to ruin, he ended up on the simulated path anyway because of his own inferiority complex. Again, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Even more so, did Lightning's realization that he was inferior lead him to resenting Jin so much? Does he blame his own flaws on the seeming fragility of his Origin? Considering Jin's broken state, I've always been under the impression he was the worst of the Lost Kids in terms of dueling and therefore suffered the most shocks and starvation. Does Lightning think this hindered his development? And does his strange mix of admiration and disdain for Ai suggest the Ai is the most advanced Ignis, as Bohman seemed to suggest, meaning Yusaku won the most? Did Ryoken's encouragement during the project lead to Yusaku producing the most developed AI?

That seems to be the implication here.

It's hard to say who will win this duel, but the repercussions are likely all the same. If Ryoken wins, Bohman will almost certainly absorb Lightning right there. If Ryoken loses, he might still, because otherwise Yusaku would have two bad guys to defeat. If it's a tie, probably the same result. No matter how the duel goes, I see Lightning "becoming one" with the fallen Ignis.

On that point, they still haven't explained how Bohman got Earth, haven't they? Unless I'm missing something, they really are just skipping that! What happened to Go and SOL?

The visuals of the new ending are hopefully just filler until the new arc starts up, because they're really... Uninteresting. Not too much to analyze there, but the long shot of Roboppy seemingly wishing on a star was kind of ominous considering last we saw her her eyes were glowing red. Ai's agonized expression before he disappears in a flurry of yellow light particles also seems kind of suggestive of something bad. The ending shows a whole bunch of the characters okay in the wake of the events of this season (thanks for the spoilers, I guess?), but the other images make me wonder if others may not be so lucky. Will Ai get absorbed into Bohman, or is that light supposed to be indicative of his relationship with Yusaku banishing his despair over his friends?

If Ryoken really does acknowledge that the Ignis aren't a inherent threat, there really will be no more reason he has to keep considering Playmaker his enemy...

[caveartfair]

15 Must-See Exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale

Installation view of Hicham Berrada, Mesk-Ellil, 2015–19, at “Luogo e Segni,” Punta della Dogana, 2019. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy © Palazzo Grassi.

This spring and summer, fresh art will fill historic churches, palazzi, and institutions across Venice. To help you navigate the flood of ambitious exhibitions and projects, we share a selection that you won’t want to miss—ranging from new glass sculptures by leading contemporary artists to the color-soaked paintings of Helen Frankenthaler.

“Glasstress”

Fondazione Berengo Art Space, Campiello Della Pescheria, 30141 Venice

May 9–Nov. 24, 2019

Fondazione Berengo Art Space. © Francesco Allegretto.

Since opening his studio on the island of Murano in 1989, Venice native Adriano Berengo has been dedicated to bridging glass traditions and contemporary art. He’s invited over 300 artists—with little or no prior experience in glass—to learn glassmaking from the masters at his studio. And for the past decade, Berengo has biannually mounted exhibitions of the resulting work, called “Glasstress,” to coincide with the Venice Biennale. This year, visitors are treated to new work and highlights from years past, including pieces by internationally renowned artists like Ai Weiwei, Laure Provoust, José Parlá, and Rose Wylie.

“Luogo e Segni”

Punta della Dogana, Dorsoduro, 2, 30123 Venice

Through Dec. 15, 2019

Installation view (from left to right) of Roni Horn, White Dickinson THE CAREER OF FLOWERS DIFFERS FROM OURS ONLY IN INAUDIBLENESS, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Felix Gonzalez Torres, “Untitled”(Blood), 1992. Courtesy of the Pinault Collection, “Untitled” (7 Days of Bloodworks), 1991. Courtesy of the Pinault Collection. Installation at “Luogo e Segni,” Punta della Dognana, 2019. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy © Palazzo Grassi.

A stark contrast to the flash and bang of the Damien Hirst exhibition that occupied the sprawling former customs building during the last Biennale, this show brings together poetic, conceptual pieces from Francois Pinault’s esteemed collection. Taking its title from a Carol Rama painting that translates to “place and signs,” the show includes works by 36 artists, with several impressive installations including a beaded curtain by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sturtevant’s appropriation of Gonzalez-Torres’s light bulb strands spilling onto the floor; and a smattering of frosty blue glass lozenges by Roni Horn.

“La Pelle - Luc Tuymans”

Palazzo Grassi, Campo San Samuele 3231, 30124 Venice

Through Jan. 6, 2020

Installation view of Luc Tuymans, Schwarzheide, 2019, Fantini Mosaici, Milano, at Palazzo Grassi, 2019. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy © Palazzo Grassi.

Pinault’s 18th-century palazzo has been turned over to Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, who worked with curator Caroline Bourgeois to mount 80-plus paintings, dating from 1986 to the present, from the French billionaire’s collection and a new, site-specific mosaic on the floor of the central atrium. Tuymans is known for searing figurative paintings—often in a washed-out palette of grays, blacks, and sepia tones—that appropriate images from the media to offer dark commentary on recent history. The marble mosaic, Schwarzheide (2019), appears to be a simple rendering of pine trees but is based on drawings that Holocaust survivor Alfred Kantor created in a concentration camp.

“Baselitz - Academy”

Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, Campo della Carita, 1050, 30123 Venice

May 8–Sept. 8, 2019

Georg Baselitz, BDM Gruppe (BDM Group), 2012. © Georg Baselitz. Photo by Jochen Littkemann, Berlin. Courtesy of Bolton & Quinn.

Georg Baselitz, Schlafzimmer (Bedroom), 1975. © Georg Baselitz. Photo by Jochen Littkemann, Berlin. Courtesy of Bolton & Quinn.

Best known for his expressive figurative paintings of inverted heads and bodies, Georg Baselitz is the first living artist to have an exhibition at the Galleria dell’Accademia. The German artist is showing his feverish paintings and drawings, as well as deftly hewn figurative sculptures, ranging from across his more than 60-year career and including new work created specifically for the show.

Jannis Kounellis

Fondazione Prada, Calle Corner, 2215, 30135 Venice

May 11–Nov. 24, 2019

Portrait of Jannis Kounellis, Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples, 1973. Photo by Caludio Abate. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.

Portrait of Jannis Kounellis, Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, Turin, 1971. Photo © Paolo Mussat Sartor. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.

The late Jannis Kounellis was a critical figure in the Italian Arte Povera movement, which saw artists transition from painting on canvas to mounting ambitious installations that broached the space between art and life. Curated by Germano Celant, this is the first Kounellis retrospective since his death in 2017. The show includes works created between 1959 and 2015, including installations and architectural interventions that explore combustion, Greco-Roman history, metaphysical dimensions, and gravity, among the artist’s other favorite subjects. A highlight is the massive installation that fills the courtyard with coffee bean–filled sacks and plates of metal.

“Pittura / Panorama: Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler 1952–1992”

Palazzo Grimani, Ramo Grimani, Castello, 4858A, 30122 Venice

May 7–Nov. 17, 2019

Helen Frankenthaler, Italian Beach, 1960. © 2019 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Rob McKeever. Courtesy of Gagosian.

The beloved Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler’s famed color-stained canvases have not been shown in Venice since 1966, when they held pride of place at the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Now, they are shown at Palazzo Grimani, an art institution that dates back to the 16th century, which is particularly fitting given the inspiration Frankenthaler gleaned from Venetian artists of that same era. The exhibition, curated by John Elderfield, includes work from four stages of the artist’s career, organizedto illustrate the evolution of her career.

“Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice 2019”

Palazzo Ca’ Tron, San Croce, 1957, 30135 Venice

May 11–Aug. 18; preview: May 8–10

Monira Al Qadiri, Wonder 1, 2, 3, 2016–17. Photo by Maksym Bilousov. Courtesy of PinchukArt Centre © 2019.

Gala Porras-Kim, Proposal for the Reconstituting of Ritual Elements of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan, 2019. Photo by Maksym Bilousov. Courtesy of PinchukArt Centre © 2019.

The Future Generation Art Prize’s biannual show spotlights impressive young artists under age 35. The featured artists are addressing the future of humanity and urgent contemporary issues around globalization, nationalism, and technology. Among work by 21 international artists, you can expect to see pieces by Emilija Škarnulytė, who won the prize this year, and as well as Korakrit Arunanondchai, Marguerite Humeau, Gala Porras-Kim, and Sondra Perry.

“Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II”

Ocean Space, Campo San Lorenzo, 30100 Venice

Through Sept. 29, 2019

Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land II, at Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo, 2019, work in progress. Moving Off the Land II is commissioned by TBA21–Academy and co-produced with Luma Foundation. Photo by Enrico Fiorese.

The beloved American artist Joan Jonas, who represented the U.S. at the 56th Venice Biennale, is the first artist to put on a public project at Ocean Space, a new cultural space dedicated to fostering research on the oceans by both artists and scientists. Jonas’s multimedia project is the result of three years of research in waters surrounding Jamaica and at aquariums around the world; through sound, video, performance, sculpture, and more, the work surfaces the vital cultural significance of oceans, both spiritually and ecologically.

“The Spark Is You: Parasol Unit in Venice”

Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia, Sestiere di S. Marco, 2810, 30124 Venice

May 9–Nov. 23, 2019

Navid Nuur, The Tuners (rendering), 2005–19. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Max Hetzler, Galeria Plan B and Galerie Martin van Zomeren.

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art celebrates its 15th anniversary with a show of nine contemporary Iranian artists, including Y.Z. Kami, Nazgol Ansarinia, and Siah Armajani. Parasol founder Ziba Ardalan curated the show around artists who embrace ideas of openness, respect, and the universal ties that humans share.

“Njideka Akunyili Crosby: The Beautyful Ones”

Victoria Miro Venice, Calle Drio La Chiesa, San Marco, 1994, 30124 Venice

May 8–July 13, 2019

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, “The Beautyful Ones” Series #7, 2018. © Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.

The Nigerian, Los Angeles–based Njideka Akunyili Crosby takes over Victoria Miro’s charming Venice gallery space with her mixed-media paintings that collage together her own cultural heritage with that of her American peers. The show includes the latest work from her ongoing series “The Beautyful Ones,” in which she continues to lend her figurative subjects emotional depth through deft use of found images, a rich color palette, and poignant facial expressions and gestures.

Philippe Parreno

Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, San Marco 1353, 30124 Venice

May 11–Nov 24

Philippe Parreno, Exhibition view, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2018. © Philippe Parreno. Courtesy of the artist; Pilar Corrias, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Photo © Andrea Rossetti.

The French conceptual master Philippe Parreno transforms the Louis Vuitton space with a multifaceted, multisensory work that toys with viewers’ perceptions. The piece, fueled by the activity of microorganisms and a computer program, is comprised of various elements—a marquee light fixture, phosphorescent wallpaper, a mirrored shutter—and foregrounds the artist’s interest in parallel realities.

“Marina Abramović: Rising” and “Renata Morales: Invasor”

Ca’ Rezzonico Gallery, next to the Ca’Rezzonico Museum, Dorsoduro 2793 and 2793A Venice

May 6–July 6, 2019; opening: Tuesday 7 May, 5pm–7pm

Marina Abramovic, Rising (VR still), 2018. Courtesy of Acute Art.

The Montreal-based Phi Centre presents a pair of exhibitions by accomplished women artists. “Rising” seeks to envision the disaster of melting polar ice caps by inviting the viewer to don a virtual reality headset; the video simulates being in a glass tank filling with water alongside Marina Abramović. Meanwhile, Renata Morales’s exhibition “Invasor” includes new ceramic sculptures of people and bestial creatures, as well as assemblages made from 70 used tires and looming self-portrait textiles.

“The Nature of Arp”

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Dorsoduro, 701-704, 30123 Venice

Through Sep. 2, 2019

Portrait of Arp, ca. 1926. Courtesy of Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth.

Jean (Hans) Arp, Pianta-martello (Forme terrestri) Plant-Hammer (Terrestrial Forms), 1916. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / © Jean Arp, by SIAE 2019. Photo courtesy of Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

Dada and abstract art pioneer Jean Arp was the first artist Peggy Guggenheim collected—she bought a bronze after seeing it made at a foundry with the artist. Decades later, that bronze is at the heart of this survey dedicated to the artist’s experimental nature. The show illustrates Arp’s ability to deftly tread the boundary between figuration and abstraction; and his mastery of material, with works in bronze, wood, marble, plaster, painting, collage, drawing, and tapestry.

“Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostrum”

Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti, Fondamenta Cannaregio, 910, 30121 Venice

May 11–Nov. 24, 2019; preview May 8–10, 2019

Lauren Bon and The Metabolic Studio, Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, 2006. Photo by Joshua White. Courtesy of The Brooklyn Rail.

This exhibition curated by the Brooklyn Rail spotlights the environmental crisis in the Mediterranean through works by 73 artists. Curators Phong Bui and Francesca Pietropaolo have gathered works by emerging and established artists with social and environmentally focused practices, such as a new piece of blown glass droplets by Maya Lin and Wolfgang Laib’s Passageway (2013), in which brass ships are submerged in a mound of rice.

“Sean Scully: Human”

Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Isola di S.Giorgio Maggiore, 30133 Venice

May 8– Oct. 13, 2019

Sean Scully, Madonna Triptych C, 2019.

Sean Scully, Madonna Triptych B, 2019.

Inspired by monks at the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Sean Scully recently added figurative work to his usual abstract repertoire. This show at the San Giorgio Maggiore church features the new work, including a series of paintings titled “Madonna,” the artist’s tallest sculpture yet, and works from a manuscript that was originally handmade by the monks.

from Artsy News

[everydayisaphilosophyday]

Coronavirus: lessons from dystopia

The comparisons between coronavirus and dystopia are so obvious they leap off the page. Naturally, this has not gone unnoticed, with suggestions that it feels like we’re living in a dystopia increasingly commonplace. But the piercing prescience of dystopian literature is astonishing. People tend to focus on the external threat of coronavirus and its infringement upon society—that’s unsurprising. But they fail to acknowledge the internal threat society poses to itself and its constituents. In light of societal response to coronavirus, here are four lessons from dystopia—two optimistic, two… less optimistic.

Dystopia

“Dystopia” is often thrown around a little carelessly: many imply that all science fiction is dystopian, or describe an oppressive home or school life as dystopian. But a dystopia affects society at large, not just small portions of it. Describing the current situation as “dystopian” is accurate in that regard: it affects all of us. Describing it as “dystopian” in its similarities to a science fiction novel, though, overlooks some important points. For a start, the distinction between science fiction and dystopian literature often boils down to the threat, not the effect. Both tend to lead to oppressive societies, but science fiction tends towards an external threat, dystopia to an internal one.

There’s overlap, of course—just read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, where technological change and the looming presence of an external threat give rise to societal change. And the line is often blurred. In John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, the triffids who have taken over the world were bioengineered by the USSR—should a threat which isn’t human but was created by humans be considered “internal”, or “external”?

Dystopian fiction is a commentary on society in which the society itself is the cause of its own demise

Despite the overlap, the hallmarks of the two are different. Science fiction deals with an external threat or some new technological development turning against us. Coronavirus fits this role perfectly. Dystopian fiction, on the other hand, is when the society itself is the cause of its own demise—often prompted by a perceived external threat. People’s comparisons to dystopia fail to pinpoint that threat—and our societal response to coronavirus shares many particular characteristics with dystopia.

Oppression

The crackdown on personal liberties in response to coronavirus is important to stopping the spread of coronavirus and saving lives. But many, like Lord Sumption, have noticed that this is “a hysterical slide into a police state”. Lord Sumption’s fears are not new. Orwell’s 1984 displays the disastrous effects of hysteria and totalitarianism. But I’d argue Huxley’s Brave New World makes a subtle point which better represents Sumption’s warning. It exemplifies how people will chain themselves up in the name of stability. For Huxley and his fictional “World-Controller”, Mustapha Mond, stability is “the primal and ultimate need” which supersedes truth and freedom. The “deep and resonant voice” of Mond is enough to remind us just how soothing the tools of oppression can be in times of urgency—while we may simultaneously pity and criticise the people in Huxley’s novel, we should remember that we can fall foul of the same mistake too.

A survey of history conveys this message time and time again: no Roman citizen should have been surprised by the demise of the Republic considering they elected a military commander to a dictatorship to maintain order. When people submit, they don’t recognise their captor. Huxley himself had suggested in 1931 to renounce parliamentary democracy and submit to tyrannical rule and eugenic methods. Naturally, in his 1946 Foreword to Brave New World, the benefit of hindsight and reflection on Hitler’s “Final Solution” had rendered such ideas utterly unthinkable.

The most horrendous authoritarian regimes arise when we throw ourselves into subjection, like lemmings hurling themselves off a cliff

History and dystopian literature both teach us that often, in avoiding one disaster, we submit ourselves to an even worse one. This is Huxley’s real point: the ‘best’ totalitarian state is one where people “do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude”. And people love their servitude because it brings stability, and stability—like getting coronavirus under control—truly is desirable. It would be wise to remember this when considering our response to the current situation. As Steve West notes, “many people claim to love the anti-censorship message of [Fahrenheit 451], but fail to notice it’s we TV watchers who are the villains.” Our criticisms often reflect on ourselves—and our failure to notice this is all the more ironic given that it’s one of dystopia’s key messages.

Unlike the Romans, we have the benefit of hindsight and dystopian literature—it would be wise to heed their warning. I’m not saying that current UK restrictions are necessarily wrong. But it’s worth remembering that the best (read, “worst”) authoritarian regimes arise when we throw ourselves into subjection, like lemmings hurling themselves off a cliff.

Fickle Technology

A second point illuminated by Huxley’s seminal work is the ambivalent nature of technological development, and the importance of proportionate and impartial responses to the challenges we face—like coronavirus. The protagonists in dystopian literature rarely actually criticise the form of oppressive society per se. Bernard never actually agrees with the reader’s perception—his dissatisfaction really lies in himself and his not fitting in. Winston too seems more upset by his own shortcomings. Although he does hate the authoritarian regime, this hatred seems to be founded on selfish reasons. Even Montag loves his job as a fireman before he learns to hate his society for what it is. These protagonists are just like us—they fail to impartially see the problems that exist, only complaining when it negatively affects them. The individual tends to heed their captor only when their capture personally bothers them.

This is not just a problem during coronavirus, but more generally. The rising sentiment for a vastly more powerful government should be treated with caution. Huxley reminded us that “the immediate future is likely to resemble the immediate past, and in the immediate past rapid technological changes (…) have always tended to produce economic and social confusion.” The response? “To deal with confusion, power has been centralised and government control increased.” The impact on the individual is represented by Bradbury’s inspiration for The Pedestrian—the precursor to Fahrenheit 451; he was stopped and harassed by a policeman for walking during the night. Lord Sumption’s warnings have strikingly similar origins. The calls for increased centralised power and nationalisation should bear this in mind.

That’s not to say that certain forms of governance, society or technology are dangers themselves. But it’s the intention and sentiment which lies behind them—and how they might be corrupted—that ought to worry us.

Technology—like authority—is fickle. This message permeates every aspect of Huxley’s writing—including the title. Miranda, upon the arrival of newcomers to the island of her imprisonment, wondrously exclaims “O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!”, not realising the treachery they represent. New technology is often a Trojan horse—impressive and exciting, but potentially harbouring treacherous innards. As Sarah Sloat notes, “Brave new world is a phrase of snark… that something that appears to be wondrous is very likely sick with corruption.” For the very same reason Huxley’s self-proclaimed theme was not “the advancement of science as such; it [was] the advancement of science as it affects human individuals”.

Dystopia teaches us the importance of being on the right side of this divide—of remaining wary of the Trojan horse, and flying carefully

This message must apply to us as we migrate online and to new technologies, especially in response to the current crisis. They offer genuinely wondrous opportunities. But disproportionate reliance mixed with a pinch of corruption will yield existential terrors—perhaps in the form of AI, for example. The comparison to Daedalus and Icarus would not go amiss—let us fly at a safe distance from both sun and sea. Indeed, Huxley was inspired by two essays—one by J.B.S. Haldane, the other by Bertrand Russell—titled “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” and “Icarus, or the Future of Science” respectively.

Haldane’s Daedalus (published 9 years before Brave New World) argues that science and his accompanying dreams are “the answer of the few to the demands of the many for wealth, comfort and victory”. He condemns the Huxleyan notion that “traditional morals were impregnable and sacrosanct to [science]” even if “science could indeed remould traditional mythology”. In direct response, Russell’s Icarus defends these traditional morals, fearing that technology would outpace them—and, wings melted, we’d end up like Icarus.

Russell’s message must be heeded now more than ever: science isn’t necessarily beneficial. Instead, “where [kindly impulses] exist, science helps them to be effective; where they are absent, science only makes men more cleverly diabolic.” Dystopia teaches us the importance of being on the right side of this divide—of remaining wary of the Trojan horse, and flying carefully.

Community

That said, some of the lessons from dystopia bode well; for a start, the return of the local community. Particularly notorious in Brave New World is its complete dismissal of local communities and families—exemplified by “mother” almost being a swear word and “viviparous” (reproductive) societies having long been banished. In Brave New World, “everyone belongs to everyone”; communities don’t exist, or only exist in the form of a vast, faceless society. The resulting people are vapid and utterly deprived of any humanity, vulnerability or relationships. John—born in an Indian village and raised on the works of Shakespeare—complains that “nothing costs enough here” and criticises the “whisking” away of emotion.

The current situation is quite the opposite. Local communities are coming together to help out the vulnerable and the elderly, to celebrate essential workers and NHS staff, and to keep each other’s spirits lifted. Face-to-face communication may be limited, but genuine personal communication with people we actually know has increased greatly. Friends help one another by doing each other’s shopping and the chores for vulnerable neighbours who can’t go out. Skype, Zoom, Facetime and the good old phone have all seen a boom in popularity as more people are spending time contacting their friends and family. It may be a difficult time, but people are looking out for each other.

It’s a sharp contrast to dystopian societies—in both 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, neighbours spy on and denounce one another; Daniel Bell called 1984 “a human society stripped of the last shreds of community”. In Fahrenheit 451, the family is torn apart and replaced with ‘friendships’ which are so utterly devoid of emotion that the mere recital of poetry drives people to tears.

The rise of the community reflects Huxley’s antidote to the two insane options offered by Brave New World: we need small, localised communities that look after one another

We seem to have avoided this fate. The rise of the community reflects Huxley’s antidote to the two insane options offered by Brave New World. This antidote is the emphasis on small, localised communities that look after one another, raise one another’s children together and make decisions together. It is in this rise of the community that Huxley locates the option of “sanity” in his last novel, Island.

Obviously we’re not quite at the level of Island’s “Mutual Adoption Clubs”. But nor are we living in Brave New World’s absurd ‘utopia’. The return of community life and values is something that ought to be welcomed and encouraged. Newfound extra time at home can be used to remind ourselves of the value of family. And we can make use of a virtual world to create communities of friends and family. All in all, we should remember those around us and care for those who matter. By doing so, we can stoke the humanity and vulnerability we’d previously lost.

Individualism

Finally, the lockdown has given us the ability to regain our individuality in a society which is becoming increasingly immune to the individual, caring only for numbers and statistics. Huxley’s Brave New World deprives every human of their individuality; they are “no more than cells in the body politic”. This body politic is defined by its motto, “COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY”, and the phrase imprinted upon every person’s mind by hypnosis: “When the individual feels, the community reels”. Each person is a cog in a machine—an absurdly mass producing happiness-in-a-bottle machine. Our own machine may not be as ruthless Brave New World’s, but it has emphasised efficiency and productivity over creativity and individuality. Coronavirus has temporarily pressed pause on this machine, and the resulting opportunity to regain our individuality should not be overlooked.

Each person is a cog in a machine—an absurdly mass producing happiness-in-a-bottle machine.

When Bernard presents Lenina with the opportunity to regain some individuality, Lenina’s response is telling. She bursts into tears, crying “It’s horrible, it’s horrible”. She questions how Bernard could even fathom not wanting to be part of the social body: “after all, every one works for everyone else”— repeating the mantra she’s been hypnotised with. We too may wonder how it’s possible to enjoy our time without being part of a larger society—we too may have been conditioned by our upbringing as “just a cell in the social body” to reject individualism.

The pace of society has been pushing us that way for a while. Instead of talking to others, thinking for ourselves and being individuals, we watch Netflix, we listen to Spotify and we Google answers. We’ve begun to give up our individuality in favour of something better—the anaesthetic happiness of easy living. We’ve submitted to Brave New World’s “soma” (‘happiness’ drug), or Fahrenheit 451’s “four walls” (televisions). We could go on watching TV all day. But the lockdown has provided an opportunity to resist this by freeing us from our vices. As Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees notes, only a great disturbance could free ourselves from this vicious cycle where decadent consumption is required to keep society turning.

Coronavirus acts as this intervention. Mind, I’m not saying it’s a positive, or something deserved. I’m just saying that it’s pulled the rug from under our economy which so resembles what Margaret Atwood described as the “boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning” in her foreword to Brave New World. And with the end of (or, at least, minimisation of) this consumption, one silver lining is that we’re free to regain our humanity. We can think and we can feel in the way Mildred and Lenina cannot. We can engage in personal projects, ranging from writing to reading; from playing music to that DIY we always wanted to do. We can learn about anything from quantum mechanics to Buddhist scripture. We can engage in the activities we want to rather than the vices we’re enslaved by.

the piercing prescience of dystopian literature is astonishing

This abundance of free time just waiting to be filled has left many feeling empty and uncertain about what to do. They feel a lack of purpose or motivation. But isn’t this free time something we spend so much time desiring? So often at work we wish to be freed from that very same work. Coronavirus has caused all sorts of terrible consequences—but the newfound time for ourselves is not one of them. I hope that we will make use of this lesson from dystopian fiction, and grab the bull of our individualism by the horns.

A last word

As Winston notes, the best books are “those that tell you what you know already”. But it’s always worth a reminder of the lessons from literature and history—otherwise we end up like Bradbury’s inhabitants, who never stop to think. Huxley said of his own writing that “a book about the future can interest us only if its prophesies look as though they might conceivably come true”—it’s no surprise, then, that Brave New World and the dystopian genre as a whole remains as interesting and relevant today as ever. It reminds us of the danger of oppression while praising our emphasis on the local community, and it tells us of the importance of the individual while warning of the fickle nature of technology. I just hope we listen.

[tripstations]

Summer vacations put an end to rampant desktop crimewave • The Register

Something for the Weekend, Sir? I’m drowning in ballpoint pens.

I mean this figuratively, of course. Let’s just say I have an uncommonly large number of ballpoint pens available for my immediate use at the moment.

How many? Ooh, several. Can you borrow one? No, get lost, find your own.

The reason I suddenly find myself awash – figuratively, again – with so many writing implements is due to a temporary change in circumstances. Yes, I have moved house by 700 miles but that’s not the whole story. The determining factor in producing my present proliferation of pens is that I have moved to a country in which everyone else is absent because they’ve gone on holiday for the whole summer.

Having no colleagues with whom to rub shoulders – figuratively or literally, I really don’t care any more – for two months means there is nobody around to nick my biros, or as I now have to learn to say, “mes bics”.

This at least is the explanation offered by health ‘n’ safety software developer protecting.co.uk, which has been quoting research on the extent of casual office-supplies pilfering. “Workplace theft costs businesses in the UK £190m per year,” it says before whipping out a calculator (hopefully not someone else’s that they borrowed off their desk eight months ago and forgot to return) and confirming that’s an average of “£12.50 worth of items per person – the equivalent of almost 30 rolls of toilet paper each!”

Note: it is standard form to conceptualise lengths by comparison with London buses, surface areas by football pitches or Olympic swimming pools, larger land areas by the size of Wales, and the value of office supplies by toilet rolls. The managing director at my very first job used to complain that stealing toilet rolls from the office bogs ought to be an instantly sackable offence, and I still can’t bring myself to disagree.

Prior to reading this research, I had wondered whether the Douglas Adams theory of ballpoint disappearance might have some validity. Mme D’s workplace was even worse than mine: at her’s, the average HEPPA (Half-life Existence Prior to Physical Absence) of any writing implement at the front desk was 6 minutes and 37 seconds.

On one occasion, she rounded up every unwanted ballpoint, felt-tip, fountain pen, crayon and school pencil we could find around the house – a clutch of about 20 items – and took them into work the next morning. By lunchtime, not one of these was still on the premises. But rather than slipping quietly off-world or into another dimension, they were simply getting nicked by co-workers and, as I think CCTV would confirm, her own notoriously ill-equipped boss.

Evidently there are some advantages to the elimination of your colleagues from the workplace. Computer automation does not nick your pen. Nor does it run off with your sticky notes, pilfer your stapler or treat limited toilet paper supplies with rampant profligacy.

Not that I want to see a permanent end to all human life at work: obviously my own contribution is absolutely essential and cannot be dismissed so wistfully. Everyone else can go, though, no problem.

There is a gentle irony in the way the general public, despite its increasing preference for online retail, self-completing digital forms and push reminders, believes that live computerised services are, or should be, constantly monitored by human overseers. Nor is this expectation restricted to domestic consumers and retail environnements, apparently. A HackerOne survey conducted during Infosec a few weeks ago suggests that even security professionals believe humans remain more effective than machines when it comes to securing digital assets.

If you’re reading this, you will already be aware that automated services aren’t overseen by humans at all. In fact, most of them are a law unto themselves. Any human element exists only in order to fix them after they have already gone mental, which they do typically every 6 minutes and 37 seconds.

Of course, you might only be made aware that things have gone wrong when you see a flag pop up or receive a message from the system itself. Automated systems have automated monitoring. But this only works thoroughly if someone has thought of all the potential scenarios in which problems can manifest.

System’s gone down? You will certainly get notified about that immediately. System is having difficulty? You might see an amber warning if you’re looking at the right screen. System is randomly playing silly buggers with a single component, such as an undocumented script that an ex-colleague, long since made redundant, wrote one Thursday afternoon to show off his skills to a subsequently unappreciative project team? This could remain a secret between the automated service and the automated monitoring system almost indefinitely.

Just over a year ago, I visited the Museum of Roman Antiquity in Nîmes. This fabulous place was full of the digital toys with which all modern museums are fitted these days, one of which was a mixed-reality space that dresses you up in virtual clothing from the classical era when you stand on the footprint graphics on the floor. Mme D and I duly pratted about in front of the camera, pretending to be Roman consuls and slave girls and so on (Mme D made a great consul, BTW) and repeatedly pressed the button to send us screengrabs by email.

Nothing turned up in my inbox, not that I really expected it to work. Evidently there was a glitch with the system and, this being France in the summer, anyone who might have been around to fix it (while not otherwise engaged stealing each other’s pens) was on holiday. It wasn’t a significant system glitch, anyway, and I supposed someone would deal with it when they got back from the beach.

Except they didn’t and eventually I forgot all about it. I was only reminded of my virtual toga-twirling when a dozen screengrabs from the museum suddenly landed by email yesterday. It’s easy to imagine what happened: someone on stand-in support duties this week was probably still brushing sand from between their toes when quite by chance they happened upon a system flag indicating that 15,000 non-essential emails dating back exactly 12 months were still sitting in a Drafts folder, accompanied by a “Delete?” confirmation prompt.

I imagine this person was reluctant to trash 15,000 unsent emails that had been addressed to customers, and probably also frustrated at the system’s equally stubborn reluctance to send the bloody things. So I further imagine the kindly human consulted the technical documentation and followed its advice to the letter: switch the email server off and then back on again. Bingo – er, “houpla” – 15,000 emails containing photos of idiots dressed up in unconvincing AR as wonky Roman legionaries are turfed into the ether all at the same time.

Click to enlarge (but do you really want to?)

Job done, this helpful human was then free to spend the rest of the afternoon trawling colleagues’ desks for unguarded pens.

I like to think the days of pen shortages is coming to a close: real-time trackable “smart” pens are surely soon to hit the market, putting an end to the misery of losing a 50p biro by convincing dullards customers to part with a “smart” one costing £500. To get in early on the highly lucrative stylus-tracking bandwagon, I am registering the domains yourpenistracked.com and seewheremypenis.com.

Premature? Nah, you have to grab these things with both hands.

Youtube Video

Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. That survey quoted by protecting.co.uk says 81 per cent of the employees they asked admitted that they didn’t regard “borrowing a pen from a colleague long-term” as a problem. It’s only borrowing if you give it back, pal. The toilet roll, though, you can keep. @alidabbs

Sponsored: MCubed – The ML, AI and Analytics conference from The Register.

The post Summer vacations put an end to rampant desktop crimewave • The Register appeared first on Tripstations.

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[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: The Turbulent History of Global Chinese Art

Wang Guangyi, “Mao Zedong: Red Grid No. 2” (1988), oil on canvas, 59 x 51.18 inches (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

A specter is haunting the Guggenheim — the lingering spirit of a wave of protest and provocation, expressed through avant-garde art forms, that in recent decades dared to address and sometimes defy the heavy totalitarian hand that has ruled China since the triumph of its communist revolution and remains uniquely oppressive and invincible today.

Manifestations of that politically charged impulse, as it emerged in contemporary art from the last decade of the previous century through the first decade of the 21st, and the conditions that nurtured it, are the subjects of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s large, new exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which its organizers have positioned primarily as a documentary survey of a particular kind of art produced during one recent period of Chinese cultural history.

In its catalogue, Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim’s senior curator of Asian art and senior advisor for global arts, writes that the big show “presents a history of contemporary art from China and the rise of global art discourse” from 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, and the Cold War supposedly ended, through 2008, the year China hosted the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

That event “seemed to announce China’s superpower status to its people and to the world,” Munroe observes. She adds, “No nation in modern history underwent such a total transformation as did China during these two decades, and few shifts have had global impact of this magnitude.” (Munroe organized the exhibition along with two guest co-curators: Philip Tinari, an American resident of China since 2001 who founded the bilingual magazine LEAP and is the director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, and the Chinese-born Hou Hanru, who is based in Rome, where he serves as artistic director of MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts.)

For China, it was a tumultuous era. In 1978, two years after People’s Republic of China founder Mao Zedong died, Deng Xiaoping, who had outmaneuvered his Communist Party rivals to become the country’s paramount leader, announced a bold plan for nationwide economic reform. Its goal: to modernize China at breakneck speed. Virtually overnight, the government ditched Mao’s militant egalitarianism for “building socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Suddenly, Mao’s “Never forget class struggle!” was out; once-reviled “private property” was in. Beijing granted more authority to managers of state-owned companies and set out to blend a measure of unabashed — if disguised, through ideological doublespeak — capitalism with a centralized economy. As the longtime China-watcher Orville Schell wrote in 1984, Deng recognized that his policy had put “a capitalist fox into a socialist henhouse.” Of that hard-to-square ideological discrepancy, the wily politician quipped, “Black cat, white cat — it’s a good cat if it catches mice.” It is in response to the whiplash-inducing political, social, and economic changes such developments fostered that the artists featured in Art and China after 1989 created many of the works on view.

The show starts by looking back to February 1989, when the exhibition China/Avant-Garde opened at the National Art Gallery in Beijing; a few months later, the government brutally crushed the burgeoning pro-democracy movement’s demonstrations in that city’s Tiananmen Square.

The exhibition “China/Avant-Garde” opened in February 1989 at the National Art Gallery in Beijing, marking a moment in China’s modern-art history from which there would be no turning back; its symbol became a no-U-turn road sign (archival photo courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; digital projection)

Munroe writes that China/Avant-Garde was “an unprecedented and rambunctious outpouring of experimental practices, including performance art, installation, and abstract ink painting,” in which artist Xiao Lu fired a gun at her own work, two life-size telephone booths; Wu Shanzhuan sold raw shrimp; Wang Guangyi showed painted portraits of Mao with superimposed grids; and, as the current show’s catalogue recalls, Huang Yong Ping “offered a diagrammatic collage, ‘Towing Away the National Art Gallery,’ showing instructions for tearing down the building and all its academic officialdom.”

Also in the catalogue, co-curator Tinari notes that the 1989 exhibition “proclaimed a moment” in Chinese art history “from which there could, and would, be no turning back.” Its symbol became a no-U-turn sign. In retrospect, some Chinese artists and activists regard Xiao Lu’s gunfire as “the first shot” signaling what would become the pro-democracy movement. Its last shots were the government’s, when it massacred hundreds of protesters in June 1989.

The current show focuses on conceptual art that developed in and emerged from China during the period under review. It was mostly such art forms, turning up in biennials and other high-profile, international festivals from the latter 1990s through 2008, that gave the broader cultural world a sense of what Chinese contemporary artists were up to during that time. Thus, the show is big on emphasizing the overseas-exhibition credentials of the artists represented, arguing that, largely through the presentation of such artworks in foreign settings, Chinese contemporary artists broke through and entered the discourse of “global contemporary art.”

In doing so, they gained the attention of Western cultural institutions and media, thereby validating or legitimizing their efforts in the eyes and annals of “global contemporary art,” which, Art and China after 1989 proposes, those same Western forces effectively control. From some vantage points, such acceptance into the “global” art club might seem like a somewhat dubious achievement; after all, “global contemporary art” may be seen as synonymous primarily with a certain, dominant sector of the international art market. Is there something to be said for standing apart?

Some of the current exhibition’s more interesting works are the earliest among them: the self-taught artist Gu Dexin’s “Plastic Pieces — 287” (1983-85), first shown in China/Avant-Garde, consisting of 287 pieces of burned, colored plastic, and evoking a tenuous sense of mortality and decay; Geng Jianyi’s “Forms and Certificates” (1988), a conceptual-art practical joke, in which 32 artists, critics, and scholars, some of whom, Geng felt, had been taking themselves too seriously, filled in a mock application form to participate in an exhibition, a document that asked for their heights, favorite plants, and other goofy data; and, from 1990, Huang Rui’s books by and about Mao, covered in black ink, which symbolically buried the remnants of once-dominant, ideologically strident Mao Zedong Thought.

Other artists also examined different aspects of a bewildering, shape-shifting zeitgeist and its discontents. In Zhang Peili’s “Water: Standard Version from the ‘Cihai’ Dictionary,” a 1991 video, the female news anchor Xing Zhibin of state-owned China Central Television reads a dictionary entry for “water” in the same dispassionate tone she would later use to read the government’s report about the end of the pro-democracy movement — without a word about its violent crackdown. (To make this piece, Zhang paid a contact at CCTV to record Xing; she never knew the tape would become a work of art.) If Zhang Peili’s video is all soulless detachment, “Young Zhang,” a 1992 oil-on-canvas portrait by Zhao Bandi of his friend, another man named Zhang, strives for naturalism in its depiction of a post-Tiananmen, ordinary guy. “[P]ainting on a straight canvas seemed too serious, so I tilted it,” Zhao later stated.

With and without live animals: Huang Yong Ping, “Theater of the World” (1993), wood-and-metal structure, warming lamps, electric cables, insects, lizards, toads, snakes, 59 X 106.3 x 63 inches (photo, left, of past installation ©Huang Yong Ping; photo, right, of current Guggenheim Museum installation by the author for Hyperallergic)

The exhibition takes its title from Huang Yong Ping’s mixed-media “Theater of the World” (1993), a screen-enclosed, tortoise-shaped cage that normally contains crickets, scorpions, cockroaches, lizards, snakes and, other creepy-crawlers that simply devour each other. Due to protests about real or depicted cruelty to animals and what the Guggenheim described as “threats of violence in reaction to the incorporation of live animals” in this work, “Theater of the World” is being shown without them. Similarly, two videos have been withdrawn. One is Xu Bing’s “A Case Study of Transference” (1994), in which two pigs are seen copulating; one is covered with Xu’s made-up Chinese characters, the other with Roman letters, in a symbolic meeting/mating of East and West — get it? — or what a wall label refers to as Xu’s “visceral critique of Chinese artists’ desire for enlightenment for Western cultural transference.”

The other video is Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s “Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other” (2003), in which pit bulls tied to treadmills, face to face and poised to attack, pant and growl desperately, but remain restrained. Concerns about cruelty to animals in such artworks is one thing, but so is their banality. Apparently, these artists never received the memo from modern art’s central committee — the one pointing out that using animals as metaphors for any kind of struggle long ago became a tired, spent, exhausted cliché.

And then there is Ai Weiwei, the sometime political dissident and most internationally famous of any of the “global contemporary artists” to have emerged from China. There was a time when some of his actions were interesting, but more recently his antics have been marked by insufferable bombast and bloated ego, a lethal mix that found its apotheosis in a tasteless, staged photo in early 2016 on the Greek island of Lesbos, in which Ai assumed the same position as the body of a dead, Syrian refugee boy which had been found in Turkey months earlier, washed up on a beach. A shocking news photo of that three-year-old child’s corpse was seen around the world, calling attention to the horrific effects of Syria’s civil war. In his imitation of that indelible image, however, Ai looked more like a beached whale. Nevertheless, the refugee crisis appears to be Ai’s issue of the moment, as evidenced by his new film, Human Flow.

Ai Weiwei, “Fairytale” (2007), mixed media; wallpaper photos of participants in a trip to Documenta funded by the artist, along with suitcases his studio designed for them

In Art and China after 1989, there is a big stack of thousands of Ai’s transcribed Twitter posts (are you listening, posterity?), photos of big Ai dropping and smashing to bits a Han Dynasty urn (supposedly a Duchamp-inspired gesture), and photos, lining one display area’s walls like wallpaper, of the 1001 “ordinary Chinese citizens” the would-be provocateur paid to send, in a “temporary migration,” to view the Documenta art expo in Germany in 2007, along with the suitcases his studio designed for them. By turning them, literally, into wallpaper, Ai strips the participants in his costly — and maybe a little bit cynical? — caper of their humanity. In such trite spectacles — this one was titled “Fairytale” — the subject is always Ai.

By contrast, some of the most humanistic works here were made with very limited resources. They include “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” (1995), an outdoor performance realized and captured on video by a group of artists from what was then known as Beijing’s “East Village” district of young, poor art-makers who used their bodies as their raw material. In “To Add One Meter,” they lie on top of each other’s nude bodies to create a human hill. In “Kan Xuan! Ai!” (1999), a one-minute video, a young, female artist, Kan Xuan, walks through a Beijing subway-station tunnel calling out her name like some kind of human-feral creature as if to declare — and claim — her existence in a city of unknown millions.

Cang Xin, Duan Yingmei, Gao Yang, Ma Liuming, Ma Zhongren, Wang Shihua, Zhang Binbin, Zhang Huan, Zhu Ming, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” (1995) performance (video projection)

Xu Tan, a member of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group, which was active in Guangzhou in the 1990s, offers a kooky-eloquent critique of the whole disparity-producing, mammon-chasing, ideologically twisted, counter-counterrevolutionary orgy of newfangled “socialist” capitalism that erupted in China with the launch of Deng’s reforms. In his installation, “Made in China” (1997-98), languid stuffed animals view mindless images of a dispiriting age in slide shows and on TV while surrounded by a sea of consumerist crap — bottles of cooking sauces, plastic toys and dolls, jigsaw puzzles, balloons, computer parts, a bathtub lined with silver fabric. In the midst of this inundation, a video monitor shows a man holding a microphone and begging as passersby dart around him. “I am sad,” he says. “I am blind. It is fortune in misfortune. […] I am okay to be a fallen soul.”

If Xu’s blind beggar is some kind of metaphor for what the soul of Chinese society and culture has become, despite the nation’s new superpower status, it’s a potent one. Perhaps, not unsurprisingly, the exhibition ends with part of the last work Gu Dexin ever made before retiring from the art world in 2009. First shown in that year, evoking the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, it is a group of white panels inscribed with large, red characters that declare:

We have killed people we have killed men we have killed women we have killed old people we have killed children we have eaten people we have eaten hearts we have eaten human brains we have beaten people we have beaten people blind we have beaten open people’s faces

Making the long march up the Guggenheim’s ramps, it becomes clear that a certain kind of art from China may have become more “global” than ever before, but as this complex exhibition demonstrates, for many of the artists who created it, as they wrestled with their homeland’s turbulent recent history, they were unwilling — or perhaps unable — to easily give up its ghosts.

Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World continues at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 7, 2018.

The post The Turbulent History of Global Chinese Art appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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Art F City: This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Happy Not-My-President’s Day

Tony Schwensen’s poem for “PUPPET PRESIDENT[S] & POWER”

Kick the week off with the closing reception of an anti-Trump poetry show at EIDIA House, part of their “Plato’s Cave” exhibition series. Tuesday, artist  Hakan Topal and curator Joanna Lehan talk about representations of refugees at CUNY’s Graduate Center, and Wednesday two artists plunge into the aesthetics of capitalism and consumption at respective openings downtown.

Things lighten up a bit starting Thursday. We’re looking forward to the NYC debut of North Carolina artist Carmen Neely at Jane Lombard Gallery and Monica Bonvicini’s oddly sexy work at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. On Friday, AFC friend Saul Chernick is opening a collaborative show at NURTUREart in Bushwick, and Saturday Liinu Grönlund’s rat-centric video work goes live at Open Source Gallery. End the week with a timely show about barriers and portals from A.K. Burns at Callicoon Fine Arts.

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Mon

Plato’s Cave at EIDIA House

14 Dunham Place Brooklyn, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

PUPPET PRESIDENT[S] & POWER Closing Reception

In honor of President’s Day, EIDIA House is throwing a closing party for their poetry invitational PUPPET PRESIDENT[S] & POWER. Expect a lot of wine-soaked Trump anxiety at this event. I’m curious about the presentation here—poems are printed Giclée on archival card stock or photographic paper and hung in the venue’s “vault”. Mostly, this is your number one place to commiserate this holiday Monday.

Tue

The Graduate Center, CUNY

365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.Website

The Flood: Refugees and Representation

Photographer Hakan Topal and curator Joanna Lehan (Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change) will present their work and discuss the tricky subject matter of representation and the refugee crisis. This is a talk many contemporary artists probably need to see, as images of or about refugees have so much potential to be a force for good or wholly problematic (cough, cough Ai Weiwei).

Wed

Baxter St at The Camera Club of New York

126 Baxter St New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Marco Scozzaro: Digital Deli

Marco Scozzaro’s technicolor still lives parody the logic of advertisements with a wry sense of humor. In the image above, “Beta 909,” for example, obsolete analog production equipment is posed on a backdrop of fruit-printed contact paper. Scozzaro claims this series is also semi-autobiographical. If that means he spent his formative years making synthpop and beta max music videos in a bodega bathroom, I’m all about it.

Arsenal Contemporary

214 Bowery New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Ed Fornieles

Ed Fornieles spent his residency at Arsenal Montreal creating a new brand: Finiliar, which has something to do with currency exchanges and kawaii culture. We have no idea what this show is going to look like, but I’m guessing it will be a cliff dive into the depths of neon capitalist dystopia.

Thu

Jane Lombard Gallery

518 West 19th Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Website

Carmen Neely: It makes it more so if you say so

I first saw Carmen Neely’s work during a studio visit at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and remember smiling as soon as I walked into her studio. Neely’s mixed-media abstractions are so full of playful personality, seeing them feels like meeting charming new friends. And indeed, Neely assigns characters to different shapes, creating alternately personal and playful narratives in her work. This is her first solo show in New York, and you will definitely want to say you were there one day—It’s easy to imagine Neely as a rising art star within the next few years.

Mitchell-Innes & Nash

534 W 26th St New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Monica Bonvicini: RE pleasure RUN

There’s something undeniably seductive about Monica Bonvicini’s work. Whether it’s a neon sculpture or painting of a burned-out building, her (usually monochromatic) pieces have a vaguely S&M quality and wouldn’t look out of place in the background of a high-fashion editorial photoshoot. But beyond looking good, they’re subtly loaded with content. Bonvicini speaks to structures, both literally (as in the architectural sense) and figuratively (as in those of power). We’re hoping this exhibition is just as smart as it is sexy-looking.

Fri

The LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University

2960 Broadway New York, NY 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.Website

Stephen Mishol: Place

Stephen Mishol’s drawings of imaginary cityscapes are captivating visual puzzles. He layers architectural styles, slightly-illogical geometries, and a sense of scale that’s just out of reality. At times, it’s uncertain whether these are fantasy drawings of the not-so-distant past, a caricature of the present, or sci-fi predictions. Either way, they make for a fun viewing experience.

Equity Gallery

245 Broome Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

FemiNest

Curated by Melinda Wang and Heather Zises, FemiNest invites six women artists to reflect on notions of domesticity. This includes Vadis Turner’s literally nest-like sculptures that reference mending (above) and Michele Oka Doner’s goddess-like figurative sculptures.

Artists: Natalie Frank, Karen Lee Williams, Michele Oka Doner, Barbara Segal, Page Turner and Vadis Turner.

NURTUREart

56 Bogart Street Brooklyn, NY 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.Website

Saul Chernick: FRAMEWERK

We’re obviously big fans of artist (and AFC board member) Saul Chernick, who contributed some pretty amazing drawings of disembodied fantasy anatomy for our Strange Genitals exhibition last fall. His drawings have a quality that reminds me of slightly-off Victorian encyclopedias, so it’s appropriate he uses “cabinet of curiosities” as a point of reference to describe this body of work. Here, he’s mixing things up a bit, inviting the public to collaborate by filling-in a series of prints that suggest frames. It should be interesting to see what that produces.

Sat

bitforms gallery

131 Allen Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Website

Quayola: Fragments

Roman artist Quayola is unsurprisingly influenced by classical culture. Specificay, he’s interested in antiquities’ decay, and how digital corruption can parallel that process. In his series “Laocoön Fragments”, for example is inspired by the Hellenistic sculpture “Laocoön and His Sons,” here, recreated with alternate “damage” imagined by a computer algorithm. It’s an interesting take on the art historical trope of artists making copies of copies of masterpieces.

Open Source Gallery

306 17th Street Brooklyn, NY 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.Website

Liinu Grönlund: It could have been

Liinu Grönlund’s solo video show at Open Source Gallery gets a nod for having one of the strangest concepts I’ve read in a while. Grönlund is interested in rats for their connotations of survivalism, overpopulation, and scientific progress (as test subjects). In anticipation of the coming mass extinction wrought by humanity, Grönlund has been reading books to rats (among other activities) to pass along human knowledge to another species. Presumably, adaptable rats collectively might outlive us?

Sun

Callicoon Fine Arts

49 Delancey Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

A.K. Burns: Fault Lines

The promotional image for this exhibition is a piece of window screen sitting over a copy of The New York Times, featuring a photo of an under-construction pipleline, wreathed in what appears to be an infinite “human centipede.” Interest piqued.

A.K. Burns’ new show is all about obstacles and portals—doors and windows and so forth. Given how hot-button walls, pipelines, and the news media have become this past year, we expect this exhibition to feel very topical.

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