Between Divine Will and Human Endeavor：Art and Activist Project
In the digital age, relationships are constructed through online communities and communication platforms. Within this virtual space, the nature of the digital environment, being both virtual and fictional, creates a sense of unreserved closeness between people. The anonymity and invisibility of the online world build a virtual surrogate for the human body, rendering the body weightless and almost ethereal. As Byung-Chul Han critiques in his book The Expulsion of the Other (Die Austreibung des Anderen), regarding human relationships in the digital age:
"Digital communication lacks the sense of embodiment compared to handwritten letters. Handwriting is still a symbol of the body, whereas all digital texts appear identical. Most importantly, digital media erases the 'relativity' of the Other. In reality, they deprive us of the ability to long for those far away or to touch those nearby. They replace proximity and distance with a sense of zero distance."
The online world also creates a peculiar space of resonance, where differences and unfamiliarities are eliminated. Relationships between people tend toward uniformity, allowing only the existence of similar Others in this borderless online interaction. With science and technology, we can quickly acquire all knowledge through searches, seemingly losing access to the mysterious and unknown. Everything can now be rendered familiar through technology. However, at the same time, the enigmatic and unknowable Other struggles to reveal its face in such a world. While the boundlessness of the internet appears to shrink the distance between people, it paradoxically creates another kind of remoteness— the loss of emotional connections. Although we can quickly "read" others through the internet, we cannot genuinely encounter them, and the embodied physicality of human beings fades away.
Thus, in this year's residency program, we draw continuous inspiration from the digital age and the post-pandemic era, using the phrase "也著神・也著人 (iā tio̍h sîn iā tio̍h jîn)," derived from a traditional Minnan proverb, as the theme. We hope to reflect on the relationships between people during the pandemic and return to physical presence and embodiment in the post-pandemic world.
From a highly technological and networked reality where everything becomes possible and uniform through technology, we aim to shift toward a space that embraces mystery, heterogeneity, and the unknown. In doing so, we seek to rebuild emotional connections and distance between the self and the Other, rediscovering the physical encounter with others in their embodied presence.
