Daily Archives: February 22, 2021

It's Okay To Cry was an introduction to Sophies face, as well as to the artist's 2018 LP Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides. That was an album that linked transgenderism with transhumanism the philosophy that we can reach our greatest potential by improving ourselves technologically. Songs like Faceshopping and Immaterial proposed that technology (including prosthetic makeup) could enhance our own self-presentation in ways that transcended the gendered, corporeal self. Through music, Sophie expressed the idea that, by creating new skins of our own, we could better express our insides, and our best sides, to the world.

It wasn't just a striking effect, but a seminal one. Less than two years later, the fashion label Balenciaga sent their models down the catwalk with similarly sculpted faces for their spring/summer 2020 collection at Paris Fashion Week. The show notes that accompanied the presentation explained that the models' prosthetic makeup was a "play on beauty standards of today, the past, and the future".

Catwalks have always been at the forefront of embodying speculative futures, and sure enough, ever since Balenciaga's Sophie-resembling show, prosthetic makeup has begun to cross over back to pop music, and into mainstream visual culture. No longer are such extreme makeovers the chief preserve of B movie horrors and mask-wearing metal bands. Rather today, prosthetic makeup is turning some of the worlds most recognisable stars unrecognisable in recent times, the likes of Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and Lil Nas X have all incorporated it into their work to expand their artistic mythologies and to challenge the static nature of their own bodies.

A headline moment

However perhaps the most high-profile use of prosthetic makeup of late has been from R&B star The Weeknd, who has placed it at the forefront of his latest album campaign. In January of last year, he appeared in the music video for standout hit Blinding Lights with a seemingly busted, bloodied face. Then in March, the singer was decapitated in the music video for In Your Eyes, before several months later his head was reattached onto another mans body in the video for Too Late, which evoked Gucci's prosthetic head runway. In November, he appeared at the 2020 American Music Awards with a face full of bandages; and finally in January this year, those bandages were removed for the video for Save Your Tears, to reveal a grotesquely swollen and contorted face, as though the singer's nose, lips and cheeks had been stretched like toffee.

Read more from the original source:
Why pop stars are having prosthetic makeovers - BBC News

Crashing into the FutureA new program on Artist Cinemas, convened by Cao Fei

http://www.e-flux.comFacebook / Instagram / Twitter

e-flux is pleased to presentCrashing into the Future, a six-part program of films and interviews put together by Cao Fei. It is the fifth program in Artist Cinemas, a long-term, online series of film programs curated by artists for e-flux Video & Film.

Crashing into the Futurewill run for six weeks from February 22 through April 5, 2021 screening a new film each week accompanied by an interview with the filmmakers(s) conducted by Cao Fei and invited guests.

The program opens with Xin LiusLiving Distance(2019-20), screening from Monday, February 22 through Sunday, February 28alongside an interview with Xin Liu conducted by Emma Enderby.

Crashing into the Future Convened by Cao Fei

With films byFei YiningandChuck Kuan,Yong Xiang Li,Xin Liu,Haonan Wang,ZhangCongcong,Zheng Yuan;and interviews with the filmmakersbyCao Fei,Emma Enderby,Alvin Li,Lawrence Xiao,Yang Beichen,andEvonne Jiawei Yuan

Various signs around us suggest that we have reached a moment where the contradictions accumulated by our history can no longer be sustained. A sense of dj vu takes hold. Once again, the uneasy organisms of this planet look up and gaze at the cosmos as they hastily crash into the future...

For this program, I've selected works by video artists from China born in the late 1980s and 1990s. Most of the featured artists studied or lived abroad for some time, and their artistic practices reflecttheir diverse influences. I have attempted to delineate thematic junctions in their works that, together, constitute a kind of rhizome wherein meaning is produced in the space between the nodes.

1.Monstrosity Contemporary culture is rife with the figures of ghosts, aliens, chimeras, cyborgs, undead, zombies, and other indescribable organisms and hybrid species. Sometimes these monsters are friendly, other times decidedly not. They could be passersby, or our partners; they might even be us. In essence, their stories are fables of humankinds contradictionsboth inner contradictions and contradictions with the world. If these monsters mirror our alienation, they also mirror our transformation,andsometimes ouremancipation.

Made during the pandemic in 2020, Yong Xiang LisIm Not in Love (How to Feed on Humans)features the artist himself as a vampire in search for more than just everlasting life. Partly a playful take on contemporary relationships, the video is also a last celebration of vampirism in a seemingly apocalyptic time. In Haonan WangsBubble (2020), foliage sprouts out of and consumes the male protagonist, transforming him into a beast to be consumed in turn by his female lover. Human and beast, desire and hunger, consumer and food become indistinguishable in a cathartic culmination of alienation.

2.Ghost Worker The New China of post-1949 witnessed an intense drive to shape the image of the worker, with poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and film devoted to celebrating and enshrining the working class. Since Chinas economic reforms of 1978, however, the relationships between various social classes in China have been dramatically transformed. With the identity of the worker ruptured and reconstituted, the working class gradually disappeared from political rhetorica phenomenon most significant amid the rapid development that globalization wrought on China in the 1990s. Today, the internet service sector spawned by the new economies of artificial intelligence in China has grown into a labor-intensive industry. This industry has given rise to food delivery workers, couriers, app-hailed drivers, and various kinds of door-to-door occupations. Digital labor gradually became unstable and isolated, a competition of speed between invisible bodiesghost workers.

ZhangCongcongsElement(2021) focuses on the relationship between capital and labor, as well as the corporeality of production. InElement, workers don their machine-operator uniforms and go on long, aimless walks by the sea. They take in the ocean breeze and bask in the sun, reminiscent of the leisurely middle-class figures of Georges SeuratsA Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte(1884-86). They are connected by a string of vague actions that cant quite be called work. Here, Zhang deconstructs the legitimacy of labor and empties its content. Stage after stage, the production chain recalls a mysterious ritual, a whispered code. Zheng YuansDream Delivery(2018) depicts a group of motorcycle couriers dressed in colorful uniform. The camera pushes and pulls, and pans over them as though ina commercial shoot. Against a backdrop alternating between pastoral park and desert ofancient ruins, they bask in the resplendent sunor fall onto the ground in intoxicated bliss. Through the juxtaposition of interviews, documentary footage, and fiction, the film encapsulates the lived realities of this new type of worker, whose vulnerable body attempts to elude the manipulations of invisible hands.

3.Cosmos in Flux Philosophical efforts to transcend human limitations and reform the universesuch as those proposed by Russian cosmism or transhumanismhave already become part of an approaching quotidian. Many technologies bear humankinds insistent belief in transformation and enhancement, and bid farewell to the body, while information becomes the medium by which we consciously intervene in the universe.

ArtistsFei Yining and Chuck KuansBreakfast Ritual: Art Must Be Artificial(2019) fades out the human as subject and exhibits a free consciousness dominated by AI, floating in a sea of fragmented memories after stellar cooling, passing through an incorporeal whisper of a dream. Is this the eve of the awakening of AI ideology? If the body can be seen as a proxy, then Xin LiusLiving Distance(2019-20) removes a tiny part of the bodya wisdom toothand sends it into space. The wisdom tooth becomes the protagonist of a melancholy trip around the cosmos, reprising the role of the Soviet spacedog Laika. The symbiotic relationship between the physicality of the wisdom tooth and the boundlessness of the universe seems to pay homage to the immortality and eternity sought in cosmism.

Cao Fei, translated by Mike Fu

Program

Week #1: Monday, February 22Sunday, February 28, 2021 Xin Liu,Living Distance, 2019-20 10:45 minutes

Living Distanceis a fantasy and a mission, in which a wisdom tooth is sent to outer space and back down to Earth again.Propelledby a crystalline robotic sculpture called EBIFA, the tooth becomes a newborn entity in outer space. Its performance is about death, body, and home, in a world where our science exploration and spiritual journeys are diverging.

Week #2: Monday, March 1Sunday, March 7, 2021 Haonan Wang,Bubble,2020 14:29 minutes

Bubbleis an urban tale of love and sacrifice set in a mysterious restaurant hidden in an alleyway. On an ordinary night, a man eats a lot of herbal plants in front of a woman, transforming himself into her food.

Week #3: Monday, March 8Sunday, March 14, 2021 ZhangCongcong,Element,2021 8:00 minutes

On an ordinary workday, three workers who do not know each other work on an invisible assembly line,all producing the sameelement.

Week #4: Monday, March 15Sunday, March 21, 2021 Yong Xiang Li,Im not in love (How to Feed on Humans), 2020 27:01 minutes

Im Not in Loverestores the tired motif of the vampire, injecting it with a sense of queer warmth. In this freakish and playfulcombination of narrative film and music video, a 386-year-old Asian vampireVampystruts about town tending to his three lovers, or symbionts. Apparently, his venom is not venomous at all, but instead grants pleasure and long life. (Alvin Li)

Week #5: Monday, March 22Sunday, March 28, 2021 Fei Yining and Chuck Kuan,Breakfast Ritual: Art Must Be Artificial,2019 8:51 minutes

Breakfast Ritualpresents a speculative glimpse into a post-Anthropocene future in which human civilization as we know it no longer exists. Over breakfast, an AI in the form of a young girl performs a ritual in a semblance of Marina Abramovis seminal workArt Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful(1975).

Week #6: Monday, March 29Monday, April 5, 2021 Zheng Yuan,Dream Delivery, 2018 9:50 minutes

An exhausted motorcycle courier falls asleep on the bench of a roadside park.In his dream, fellow couriers gather together in a Shanzhai, or counterfeit, parkin the desert where the previously mobile riders have become static statues.The scene stands incontrast with the speed and efficiency with which they pursue their work around the clock,revealinganother side of the Chinese economic miracle.

Cao Fei(b. 1978,Guangzhou) uses moving image, photography, installation and performance to explore the daily lives of people navigating accelerated changes and chaos in social, political, and technological landscapes, especially in, but not limited to, Chinese and Asian societies today. Anchoring her projects in historical research and film histories, she also embraces mass cultures like cosplay, games, popular music and social media to reflect on the human condition, and the realities of global flows in contemporary post-capitalist societies. Cao has had solo exhibitions at Centre Pompidou Paris (2019), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2018) and MoMA PS1, New York (2016), among other venues. Her works have been presented at the Venice Biennale (2003, 2007, and 2015), Yokohama Triennale (2008), Tate Modern, and the Berlinale, amongst others. Forthcoming solo exhibitions will take place at MAXXIthe National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, and at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2021).

About Artist Cinemas Artist Cinemasis a new e-flux platform focusing on exploring the moving image as understood by people who make film. It is informed by the vulnerability and enchantment of the artistic processproducing non-linear forms of knowledge and expertise that exist outside of academic or institutional frameworks. It will also acknowledge the circles of friendship and mutual inspiration that bindthe artistic community. Over time this platform will trace new contours and produce different understandings of the moving image.

For more information, contactprogram@e-flux.com.

See the rest here:
Crashing into the Future - Announcements - E-Flux

The historian Pierre Goubert tells us that in 1654, the year of Louis XIVs coronation, life expectancy in France was 25. At the center of every village was a cemetery; death defined life. What a contrast with our day, when existence is no longer brief, as ephemeral as a passing train, to recall a metaphor from Maupassant. For us, death no longer lies at the heart of existence; it is the terminal point that we attempt by every means to put off, even to ignore, though it still terrifies us. It is the supreme obscenity.

For more than a century, the human race has been staying around longer than expected, at least in developed countries, where life expectancy has risen 25 or 30 yearsexcept in Russia, where health is undermined by alcoholism and poor health care, and in the United States, where, in certain Appalachian counties, the white working class, haunted by social despair and the opioid crisis, now has a life expectancy below Bangladeshs, according to economist Angus Deaton.

This extension represents immense progress, since it is accompanied by a delay in the onset of old age, which two centuries ago began at 35. When Honor de Balzac in 1842 evoked a 30-year-old woman, he described a person already aware of the shadows of autumn and ready to leave behind the life of love in order to enter old age. For us, this is a truly strange attitude; beyond 50 years or so, the human animal enters a kind of holding pattern: a person is no longer young but not yet really old, experiencing a kind of weightlessness. Once time was a movement toward an end, oriented toward spiritual perfection or fulfillment. Childhood tended toward adolescence, and adolescence toward adulthood, which in turn flowed gently toward middle and old age. But now an unprecedented phase is opening up between these last two periods.

This phase is a kind of reprieve that leaves life open like a swinging door. It transforms everythingrelations among generations, social-welfare finances, the cost of elder care, and our attitudes about work and romantic love. If aging is to be assigned a place on the calendar, becoming little by little a figure of the past, we now refuse to accept our status as caught up in the common condition. I am of a certain age, but I am not necessarily identified by it; I note a gap between the images associated with my official condition and what I feel. When this gap becomes massive, as is happening todaywhen a Dutch citizen, aged 69, sues the state to change his official age because he feels like a man of 49 and is subject to discrimination in the workplace as well as in his love life (notably, when he goes on Tinder)then we are experiencing a slippage of worldviews, for better and for worse.

We no longer act our age because age no longer makes us or unmakes us; it is simply one variable, among others. We no longer want to be fixed to our date of birthor, for that matter, to our sex, skin color, or status. Men want to be women, or the reverse, or neither one nor the other; white people consider themselves black, old people are babes. Everywhere the human condition escapes us, as we enter the era of liquid generations and identities. Today, many yearn to be free of the yoke of age and to benefit from the suspension between middle and old age, seeking to invent a new art of living.

This might be called the Indian summer of life. The baby-boomer generation was a pioneer in this regard: it created the path that it is now following. It reinvented youth, and now it thinks that it can reinvent old age. It is in this interval after 50, when one is neither young nor old but still teems with appetites, that we confront the great questions of the human condition so acutely: Do we want to live long or intensely, to start over or to take a new turn? How are we to look on remarriage or a new career? What gives us the strength to press on despite bitterness or satiety, and what motivates us every morning to start afresh? This is why late middle age is the philosophic age par excellence, whether we like it or not, because it forces each of us, man or woman, to reconsider the great intellectual problems.

We have seen the rise of a new category: seniors, a Latin term recovered to capture those who are graying but active, in good physical condition and often financially better off than the rest of the population. This is the time when many, having raised their children and completed their conjugal duties, divorce or remarry, dreaming of a new spring in the autumn. In other words, there is no longer one time of old age but several, and the only one now where the word really fits is immediately before death. This reprieve brings with it both passion and anxiety. What are we to do with these 20 or 30 extra years? The time available shrinks and the possibilities become more limited, but there can still be discovery, surprises, shattering loves.

At least two models are available in our individualistic society: either we rediscover at 60 the dreams of adolescence; or we decide that the game is basically up and join the folks playing bingo while waiting for their soup. On one side, we see the tribe of retired people on vitamin supplements, often in good physical shape. They usually belong to the upper middle class or are rich; they want to sink their teeth into life and display fierce energy at a time when their predecessors were often senile or bedridden. On the other side, we see faded people, resigned to their fate and determined to withdraw from the tumult.

The emergence of Viagra, along with hormonal treatments for women, offers intoxicating powers to people in their sixties. This has unsettled relations between the sexes, often accentuating the subordination of women. How many aging spouses are separated when one of them, breaking the truce of abstinence, rediscovers a taste for sexual adventure? Its worth noting that the two great ages of divorce in Europe are between 20 and 30 and between 50 and 70: in the first, young couples, married too soon, break up after discovering their incompatibility; in the second, older spouses take off on a new adventure, unhindered by the fact that their standard of living may fall or that they might end up alone. Freedom and the wish once again to control their own destinies take precedence over the risks involved.

The eagerness of seniors, looking to roll the dice one last time, to get involved in sports, travel, work, and saturnalia of the flesh stems from the new strategic depth regarding time now available to us. In Europe, the average age of maternity has reached 30, and the locking of the womb at menopause might one day be pushed to the age of 60. (The worlds oldest mother is an Indian who gave birth at 74, through in-vitro fertilization.) One may find this a pathetic vision. Still, to reproach the elderly for their misplaced appetites, for wanting to take on new things, to continue to work, is to condemn them to an anticipated death, and to condemn ones own future at the same age. Isnt there a certain beautyeven if the body is weakeningin defying the old temporal order, outflanking ones destiny and allowing oneself, at least for a while, an extra portion of intoxication, of sensations, of encounters? Life is perpetual uncertainty, an uncertainty that, as long as it lasts, proves that we are alive.

A significant drawback nevertheless remains. It is not youth that science and technology have extendedit is old age. The true miracle would be to sustain us until the threshold of death in a state and with the appearance of an adult of 30 or 40. Though research on life extension is working on this, the goal remains remote. Our added years can sometimes be a poisoned gift; we live longer but sick. Medicine, from this perspective, becomes a machine to produce disability and dementia. The extra years allotted to us can be years with worn-down bodies. We would so like to keep our favorite face, the one we would choose out of all those we have passed through over the decadesor get it back with a stroke of the scalpel.

Classically, philosophy made old age a synonym for wisdom, the great time of peace and serenity, when the essential was extracted from the optional. The withering of the body left only what counted: greatness of spirit and the souls beauty. With the extension of lifes duration, this model was obscured. There is a newly active life, for some older peoplebut also, for others, a weakened existence that we turn away from like a ghost, the specter of ourselves as aged and bedridden, waiting for extinction. As for the wisdom of the aged, we often suspect that this is another name for resignation to an impoverishment of life and relegation to special elder homes with fancy names, little more than medicalized places of death.

Yet it would be nice gradually to get over the excessive appetite for earthly pleasures, to dedicate oneself to meditation and study, and to pronounce oracles in the form of definitive maxims, thus preparing oneself gently for the Great Departure. Sophocles, at 80, if we are to believe Plato, was content finally to be liberated from the cruel burden of desire, an experience analogous to that of a people who overthrow a tyrant, or of an emancipated slave. It is not clear that such a liberation is attractive to some of our contemporaries. It may be, in fact, that the secret of happiness in later life consists in precisely the opposite approach: cultivate all ones passions up to the very end, renounce no pleasure, no curiosity, but continue to the end to work, to learn, to travel, remaining open to the world and to others.

Is to philosophize also to learn to die, as Montaigne said? All classical thought until the Enlightenment considered meditation on death the very meaning of existence. But is this not today a strange recommendation, even for those who care more about flourishing in this world than obsessing about the next? Dying, alas, is not something we need to learn; it happens without our help, except in the case of suicide. Nothing prepares us for death: even the most austere ascetic and the most ardent believer are surprised when the Reaper comes for them. What matters, perhaps, is not to learn to die but not to die while one is still alivenot to become a zombie, going through the motions of daily life, without soul or vitality. What matters is to be alive until the last day.

I am still surprised in the U.S. when I see waiters and waitresses spryly at their posts, despite wrinkles and gray hair.

To go on living is to recount a list of physical disasters so obvious that it would be fastidious to list them. As the proverb says, if, after 50, you no longer hurt somewhere when you get up in the morning, then youre dead. Illness is indeed the cost of longevity, and degenerative diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons strike mostly people over 65. To age is also to put up with some pains that cannot be healed but that at least can be contained by medications. We submit to repairs, piece by piece, like an old sedan that breaks down every 100 miles but that runs again after an overhaul. Age, despite the illnesses that threaten the faltering body, is no longer a verdict, no longer the threshold beyond which a person is obsolete. Now a person can modify his fate up to the last moment.

There is joy mixed with anxiety in this experience of aging, having escaped the worst pathologies. This is the joy, however absurd, of still being alive, of inhabiting ones body, however worn down. For now, the transhumanist dream of immortality or hyper-longevity remains a chimera, the preserve of a few billionaires who wish to digitize their brains or have them preserved cryogenically until science finds a way to rejuvenate our cellsdespite the risk that a power failure could end the experiment, leaving those hoping for eternity to decompose as the ice melts.

As for retirement, it involves an ambiguity: though it represents a significant social achievement, it also creates the aged condition that it is supposed to relieve. Certain unpleasant tasks require an end to activities for a body worn by repetitive work. But for other, less strenuous occupations, this change of life can be a double burden: one becomes poorer while facing the troubles of aging; one is obliged to leave active life and face a reduced income. We cast off adults perfectly healthy in mind and body, who then wither after a few months of inactivity. To define a whole age group as a leisure class, limited to nothing but consumerism, was a profound mistake, brought about with the best of intentions in the aftermath of World War II. Experience and insight generally progress with the years; to keep an activity or find one is to stay connected with others, to be involved in service, to be an agent in the full sense of the term.

The United States and Europe behave very differently in this domain: in America, concern for freedom is considered much more important than the Old Worlds emphasis on security. Thus, I am still surprised in the U.S. when I see waiters and waitresses spryly at their posts, despite wrinkles and gray hair. In the universities, one finds professors in their seventies and even early eighties teaching classes. The French term for retirement, retraite, is the same as the military word for retreata synonym for defeat. For many salaried employees, it indeed represents the double burden of leaving active life behind at the same time as income is reduced. The obligatory end of work in Europe for those in their sixties, with variations according to occupations, plunges us into the curse of leisure held up as a way of life. This free time is most commonly used not for cultivating interests but for self-hypnotizing in front of the screens that fill the lions share of ones time.

The third age has never been the philosophic age more than it is now; it is the time when all the challenges of the human condition present themselves starkly, as they were defined by Kant: What am I allowed to hope, to know, to believe? The Indian summer of life is truly this conversation of the soul with itself, as Socrates described it, a condition of permanent self-examination. In this phase, one may alternate the active life with the contemplative. This is the time when we confront the tragic structure of existence without mask or blinders. By the time we learn to live, it is already too late, said the French poet Louis Aragon. But life is not an academic affair; it is ceaselessly adjusting the preconditions for its own learning. While youth is the time when our talents come into their own, old age can also be seen as the last phase of education rather than a time to be put out of commission. Seneca liked to say that we are learning as long as we are living, down to our last breath. We can combine the joy of teaching with the joy of being taught; we can profess truths as we ask questions, in perfect reciprocity. We still have enough time to open ourselves once again to the world, to recommit ourselves to learning, becoming a little child at an age when others once went to the grave. We are not missing real life, because there is no one true life but many interesting paths that remain to be explored.

While youth is the time when our talents come into their own, old age can also be seen as the last phase of education.

What is there to do once you have become yourself, once you know yourself? What could be finer than a thumb in the eye of fate, granting oneself, at least for a while, a little additional drunkenness, and more sensations and encounters? The Great Rebeginning is for many the only form of eternity that we have found. There are many lives within the life of a man or a woman, and these come together without being assimilated. What are we to think of these grandmothers who bring their grandchildren to school on a scooter, these grandpas who ride gyro-cycles and dress like young adults? We are seeing the total confusion of ages: mothers dress like their daughters and grown-ups like superannuated adolescents; each generation wants to live not the life of its ancestors but that of its descendants. We sow our wild oats despite the time on our biological clocks: young people move in together as young as 20, while their graying parents frolic in multiple affairs. The exuberance of the third age can sometimes seem laughable, or even infuriatingbut would you prefer old folks slipping gradually toward the grave, closed up in specialized assisted-living homes? What is more exhilarating than to break the rules?

Will this new age be a transfigured maturity or a quavering post-adolescence? It will no doubt consist in a tension between the two. The tragedy of old age, Oscar Wilde said, is not that one is old, but that one is young. Even after 50, youth can be present within us as the possibility of mad exploits, diverse ecstasies. It whispers in our ears that nothing is too beautiful for us, that everything is still possible: only others regard, especially that of our children, brings us back to reality. On the one hand, the benefit of aging is that we often develop a growing taste for nature, for study, for silence, for meditation and contemplation, a penchant for cultivating nuance as opposed to the taste for the absolute; on the other, many experience an attachment to pleasure in all its forms that is still vivid, and even renewed. Will the new seniors be guardians of a heritage, or old satyrs, worn out with debauchery, in the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau? Narcissistic rascals like Donald Trump, or august, white-bearded ancestors?

We have not found the solution to the misfortunes of the human condition but have merely opened a little skylight in the cave. A seventeen-year-old is not serious, sang Arthur Rimbaud. Nor are we invariably so at 50, 60, or 70, even if conventions oblige us to appear as such. We can turn age against itself with humor and elegance, stripping it of its decrepit ornaments. At every stage in its unfolding, life can fight back against the irreversibleand this until the dive into the abyss.

Pascal Bruckner is a French philosopher and author of many books, including A Brief Eternity: The Philosophy of Longevity. His article was translated by Alexis Cornel.

Illustrations by Sol Cotti

Here is the original post:
The New Aging - City Journal