Festival Focus #3: In conversation with Alice Yuan Zhang
“We are witnessing a growing interest toward decentralisation. How can decentralisation be in service of decolonisation?”
Author: Chiara Pitrola
Ahead of the FIBER Festival taking place from 11 to 14 May, we caught up with our symposium speaker Alice Yuan Zhang about her work within healing practices in relation to technology and decentralisation within infrastructures. How can we bring the technological in balance with the ecological?
Dear Alice, thank you for taking the time to connect. Would it be possible to briefly introduce your practice/research and how you situate yourself?
I am a media artist, born in northern China and currently living in Los Angeles. My interests span ethnobotany, ecotechnics, embodied knowledge, Daoist philosophy, intergenerational exchange, and various modes of collective organising. Currently, I engage primarily through writing and teaching, while extending my repertoire of technological mediums beyond immersive AR/3D and toward more analog and minimal tools.
In what ways does our festival theme “Fragments” speak to you and how do you relate it to your work?
We are witnessing a growing interest toward decentralisation in recent years. I am very intrigued by what this means in practice. It is one thing to wish to exit the incumbent landscape of platforms and institutions, and another to actually maintain alternative infrastructures that work. This is a moment of imaginability without clear answers, which feels anxious, chaotic, but can be powerful as well. People are testing many different theories of change. I hope for humble cross-pollination between these perspectives and a shared commitment to undo planetary harm for the long run.
Could you tell a bit about your "Becoming Infrastructure" year-long research process that consisted of writings, workshops, and public experiments? Is there anything in particular that you feel you have grown in through this constellation of experiments? What holds the fragmented nature of experimentation together for you?
I initially embarked on researching the material aspects of tech infrastructure in order to process my pandemic-intensified digital fatigue as well as my doubts toward Web3. I like to experiment with research itself as artistic practice, so “Becoming Infrastructure” became a sandbox of various formats that invite emotion, embodiment, and interspecies entanglement in understanding the otherwise mundane topic of infrastructure. As I learned more about the unspoken underbelly of extraction that sustains our technological desires, I began to feel a deep sense of grief. I turned this inside out by hosting a series of technological grief rituals, which has been a generative way to decolonize assumed notions of technological progress and economic growth.
On your website you write about healing practices towards technology to "bridge the bitsphere and biosphere", what is your relationship with the biosphere?
Ecological relations remind us of how to be human. When I learn about forests travelling in search of more hospitable conditions, I have a better sense of my own migrant identity. When I exchange seeds that hold relevance between cultural backgrounds, I see that solidarity has history. Likewise, as we consider where metals come from and e-waste goes, we can recognize the need for less harmful technological infrastructures.
Is the idea of linking healing to technological tools a way to harness our symbiotic relationship with them in a positive and less alienating way?
Technology should be understood as a sociological process. It is simply the way that we live, plan, and interface with our surrounding environment. In order to make technology that is less alienating, we have to stop alienating ourselves from the earth. Under this fragmented era of the Anthropocene, I advocate for a lens of healing rather than tactics of control in order to invite more radical sensing, synchrony, and surrender.
Alice has been invited to be part of FIBER Festival 2023 with the support of the International Visitors Programme from Nieuwe Instituut. She will be joining the festival symposium, happening on Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 May at de Brakke Grond. More information: https://www.fiberfestival.nl/symposium