WERETIGERS, FROG MARSHALS AND OTHER MODERN MEDIUMS

hat, precisely, do we mean when we talk about ‘medium’ and ‘media’? The answer is far from obvious. In fact there turns out to be considerable multivalence in the concepts. Art history and media theory, for example, do not operate with the same understanding of the terms: in art history, ‘medium’ might refer to a genre of art and the materials in which it is executed; in media theory, the concept extends variously to technological, cultural, social and even psychological phenomena.

And yet, in our hypermediated present, the question of mediation and what it means is fundamental: mediation is everywhere and seemingly encompasses everything.

At the same time, and in spite of this, it has irretrievably lost any sense of innocence. We are all too aware that all acts of mediation are potentially fraudulent, as a result of which they are subject to ongoing scrutiny and permanent doubt. One might even say that the relation of modernity to technologies of mediation is schizophrenic: on the one hand, modernity purges the world of its manifold rituals of mediation in the name of rationality and science; on the other, it leads to the proliferation of technologies of mediation, of which our dematerialised digital age is but the latest symptom.

A distinction between ‘human’ and technological media has persisted since the latter’s rise to prominence during early modernity. How do we think these poles together? At times there are points of tension between them, and one of these comes in the form of shamans and other humans who act as mediums. How such humans, but also entire masses, especially under the influence of ‘mass media’, come to act as ‘mediums’ themselves has posed a great riddle to modern knowledge, simply because the channels of transmission – what goes on in such instances between bodies and minds – remain somewhat mysterious and difficult to rationalise. Hence the wider phenomena of what could be called ‘social mediality’ (the fact that our subjectivity is socially mediated) have been relegated to ‘psychology’, to the ‘unconscious’ or to an allegedly ‘primitive’, ‘irrational’ and ‘magic’ past. Mediums such as shamans, and the phenomena they embody, have become the ghosts of modernity.

The recent works of Singaporean Ho Tzu Nyen and Taiwan’s Hsu Chia-Wei endeavour to bring these ghosts back into the present. The work of both artists demands that art history engage with both the colonial foundations of modernity and the troubled relation between modern and nonmodern, human media. Against this backdrop, their works put forward an expanded notion of media: not only because it encompasses both the material and the immaterial aspects of mediation, but because it looks at how modernity is mediated ideologically.

Hsu Chia-Wei’s video installation Spirit-Writing (2016), recently shown in the 10th Taipei Biennial, is the second work that the artist has devoted to a frog deity, allegedly born in a small pond more than 1,400 years ago in Jiangxi, China, and whose original temple, in Wu-Yi, was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, Marshal Tie Jia, as the deity is named, was forced to migrate, eventually settling on an island in the Taiwan Strait. There, it has continued to communicate with local villagers via a divination ritual that involves the former carrying a divination chair, through which the Marshal makes his declarations both in writing (in Chinese characters) and through knocking sounds. Hsu’s work consists of a performance of this ritual, recorded in a ‘green room’ equipped with multiple cameras and sensors for the purposes of motion capture. The story of the displacement of the deity is thus mirrored in the technological setup, which enables de- and recontextualisation. The sensors and cameras capture the movements of the divination chair, and place it in the abstract Cartesian space of a 3D grid. Crucially, the villagers that carry the structure are left out of this transposition.

SO WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR A FROG DEITY TO BE GIVEN A HOME IN A TEMPLE RECONSTRUCTED AS 3D SIMULATION?

In the session, Hsu explains the process of making Spirit-Writing to the deity, and interrogates it about the shape of the destroyed, original temple, which the artist then also reconstructs as a wireframe model. This simulation is shown simultaneously with the greenroom performance, but on the opposite side of the screen, which is placed in the centre of the exhibition space. While one side documents the divination ritual, where the villagers as well as the artist engage with the Marshal, the other side shows the transposition of deity and temple into a virtual space of digital coordinates. It is as if the simulation also presents a quasi-spiritual counterpart, the ‘other world’, in which the deity might reside, and in which lost landscapes and a lost past can be reconstructed and reclaimed. The digital space here acts as a refuge for the victims of modern forms of iconoclasm in which they are consequently displaced rather than destroyed.

There is, however, in the 3D simulation, a strange conflation of the ‘uncanny’, ghostlike levitation of the spastically moving divination chair and the vivid sense of uprootedness and abstraction that the object floating in the 3D rendering transmits. To understand how this conflation both annuls and accelerates the difference between digital media and spirit media, it is worth looking into the ‘green screen’ technique that is used by Hsu to effect the displacement.

Green screen is a generic technique used in film to create a homogeneous background for a scene that, in the editing room, can be replaced with a different image. It is thus a technique of extraction, severing a thing from its milieu or environment, a figure (or motif) from its (back)ground. It allows the placement of such a figure in whatever desired new context, milieu or environment. It might therefore be referred to as the paradigmatic modern image-technology, mirroring modernity’s powers of displacement. It also renders the relationship between figure and ground inherently problematic. Indeed, it can be elevated to an allegory of the ontological upheaval that is modernity, an allegory of the broken instrumental link between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’. ‘Ground’ ceases to serve as a guarantor of a primordial stability, and loses its ‘natural given-ness’, which once tied each ‘spirit’ to a certain context and place. This is perhaps the most fundamental sentiment of modernity: the loss of ground, the alienation from the environment. And it is this broken link that exposes our existence as mediated. To bring mediation to the fore – to expose it – is thus the teleology of modernity.