REALIZED WITH FINANCIAL SUPPORT BY

The exhibition is realized in collaboration with Ok Corral and Science Friction. Live-performances and concerts in collaboration with 8-bit klubben.

The catalog ANTI-HUMANISM is edited, designed and realized by Jakob Kudsk steensen.

The catalog is printed in Copenhagen, 2015.

Front -and back- cover by Lu Yang. Text: ANTI-HUMANISM by Jakob Kudsk Steensen MACHINE-SPIRIT by Rachel Marsden in conversation with Lu Yang and Vanessa Bartlett

HOW 8-BIT MUSIC TRUMPED ANTI-HUMANISMby 8-bit guro Anders Carlsson aka. Goto80

ANTI-HUMANISM is a solo-exhibition with the artistLu Yang.

The exhibition and catalog ANTI-HUMANISM is curated, produced and designed by Jakob Kudsk Steensen.

Stills from Lu Yangs video Krafttremor - Parkinson’s disease orchestra (2012)

Preface

By Jakob Kudsk Steensen

ANTI- HUMANISM is a project which has the art of Lu Yang at its core. Her work gives visions of contemporary techno- scientific and post-human paradigms, as some-thing which are as appealing and entertaining as they are carcinogenic. The works included in the exhibition can be understood as ways of relating to current day clashes between science, high-tech entertainment culture, religion and understandings of the human body.

In the digitally animated video Wrathfull Kingcore, the Buddhist God of violence and wrath is depicted alongside neuroscientific illustrations. In Lu Yang’s work UterusMan, inspired by computer-games and Japanese Animé, we fol-low a gender-less hero, who combats genetic mutations and infections inside the human body. Krafttremor: Parkinsons Disease Orchestra is a video-work challenging the ethical limitations of bio-technologies and the control these can have over humans. In the music-video Cancer Baby we see specific kinds of cancer cells animated as figures dancing happily together as one big family to kitsch comput-er-game music.

When first encountering Lu Yang’s works, they might appear Anti-human in how they utilize extreme expres-sive measures to disrupt more conventional imaginations of the human body. However, when looking beneath the flashy 3D mediated layers of her practice, far more potent questions arise:

How can you be a Buddhist (or a worshipper of any religion) when science and technology influence life in its entirety today; through education, media and modern commercial patterns are in favour of increasing levels of technological influences on global scales? How does it make you feel as an individual, knowing your body is composed of millions of organisms and cells undetectable to the naked eye? Knowing your survival is only partially influenced by the conscious choices you make? That an emotion like anger essentially is nothing but the product of specific neurons firing, chemicals released within your brain?

In this catalogue I have written an introduction to Lu Yangs work and the concept of Anti-Humanism. I have tried to enable the production of a publication is more essayist and inspirational rather than strictly academic. British curator and Ph.d. Rachel Marsden has conducted a personal interview with Lu Yang in conversation with Vanessa Bartlett on the “Spirit” of machines. The text also dives into issues realted to the representation of mental -and health- disabilities in China.

Rather than curating the work of Lu Yang alone, it has been my intention to introduce her work outside of conventional art scenes. As such, I have worked together with Science Friction and 8-bit klubben to host live-per-formances and concerts with practitioners who experiment with ways of expressing themselves in an “age” of techno- science. Anders Carlsson (aka. GOTO80 and “DATA-SLAV” [data-slave]) has therefore written a retrospective piece on his relationship to narratives about 8-bit music as a genre. He reflects on who is the object and subject in human-computer relationships. He also explores on how the genre initially revolved around the machine itself, rather than the idea of “playing music”.

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ANTI-HUMANISM

By Jakob Kudsk Steensen

The idea for producing a project titled Anti-humanism with the art of Lu Yang at its epicentre was conceived in 2011. I was at a lecture with the art theorist on post-hu-manism Jacob Wamberg. Simplified, post-humanism refers to the idea that we have evolved into something more than the biological human entities which we were born as. Post-humanism explores how technologies and scientific interpretations of the world have changed who we are (physically, robotically and biologically) and (mentally) how we relate, not only ourselves, but the human species in relation to the universe.

Comparatively to Wambergs ideas, Lu Yang’s art breach-es through the framework of traditional views on what humanism is (the ethos, ideals and ethics we live by) and what it means to be human (in the biological meaning of the word). Where the maority of post-human art has a clear positivist vision of the future, Lu Yang’s art is more dialectic and expressive. However, to consider Lu Yang’s art to be anti-humanistic only makes sense, if you have a strict definition of what humanism and a human is.

Lu Yang’s work can be understood as anti-human for those who adhere to conventional and fixed understandings of “humanity” and the human as an entity: a complete individual being whose ethical codex and way of living is determined by some universal “human” laws. Thinking technology has some form of anti-human essence, would require a set of values on which to make the judgement.

Anti-humanism refers to two things: it can refer to ideas about technology and bio-science as alienating “us” from our “selves”. From a conventional humanist perspective, neither biological or computational technologies are “nat-ural”. From this point of view increasing levels of bio- and computer- make us “less” human. However, for those who believe in the necessity for technological-progress the term is positive, by signifying the abolishment of previous hu-manist ideals. This latter approach is not too unfamiliar to post- humanists and the it signifies a sense of “naturalness” about the use of technology by humans.

A concept like post-humanism suggests that we are “past” and further developed, away, from more traditional hu-man-”isms”. Lu Yang’s work do not express a clear message of the impact bio-technologies have on contemporary life as being good or bad. Instead, Lu Yang’s work gives you the opportunity to meet a different kind of human, and it is up to yourself to evaluate what you think about your meeting. Do you find it hostile or appealing?

Just as much as Anti-humanism is a concept with a para-dox, Lu Yang’s work is dialectic. Her impressive body of work does not project a defined set of values for how to think about the influence of technology on life. Numerous artists and writers have addressed how technology and late 20th century advances in bio -and neurosciences- have influenced how we think about what it means to be hu-man. Since the 1980s it has become an established subject. However, for someone born in the late 1980s like myself, computational and scientific ways of thinking about our place in this world is not uncommon.

The influence of technology and science on the human body and everyday life no longer appear “new” or “de-humanizing”, and many of the ideas of past thinkers and practices of artists have already become somewhat nor-malized, while also problematic. If anything, thinking, and making art about human-technology relationships has (recently and relatively) developed into one of the most popularized subjects among young artists.

Ideas about the human body as a form of container of or-ganic material are also not uncommon, nor are notions of our corpus as something without prefix, capable of being manipulated and altered. Donna Haraway’s manifesto on “Cyborgs” from 1983 has been canonized for emphasizing, that even though we might categorize ourselves as male or female, our gender is capable of being altered. To Haraway there is no reason to think we are born as specific people and to be in certain ways, mentally and biologically. With the aid of technologies we can modify our bodies physical-ly and we can alter how we communicate and think.

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It is not uncommon for “post-human” artistic practices to create robotics, bio-art and art-science experiments in attempts at artistically showcasing what the future might hold. Art forms of the present and the future. Following these practices are often ideas about humans not being individuals, but part of swarms of biological entities today connected by technological devices as much face-to-face communication. The theory by French writer Deleuze on the “Rhizome”, has been adopted by theoreticians on how the internet and technologies make us all connected in ways that allow for ideas and practices to be generated without hierachy; as if a rhizome, a root structure that grows freely in all directions.

Many of thes post-human art works are forms of concep-tual art manifested in actual technological and biological creations. To name three of the most renowned artists: Ste-larc has connected a robotic remote-controlled arm to his nervous system. Eduardo Kac has supposedly transcribed the gene which make a jelly fish fluorescent into the skin of a rabbit; making it glow bright green under fluorescent light. Oran Catts and Ionat Zurr have been developing work from organic tissue material as art works. These artists have been canonized by now and written within a particu-lar post-human and techno- scientific history of late 20th century art. But I think it is about time fresh thoughts and artistic practices are introduced to the subject.

What I find fresh in Lu Yang’s work is how it exists within the aesthetic framework of present day digital media, but treats the same bio-ethical and political- sensitive subject as past “post-human” artists. Only she has not been creating actual robots and biological objects (yet) which in them-selves are the art works. Instead, she has focused on creat-ing art works which asks questions but also create strong expressions which somehow seem to relate to some form of present day aesthetic sensibility. Her work has dealt more with perception and recognition than practical appliance. She embraces fiction as much as actual scientific research and diseases, such as Parkinsons; a complicated subject to treat in China as Rachel Marsden has elaborated on in her article in this publication.

Take Lu Yangs video Wrathfull Kingcore for example. In it we see the Buddhist deity Yamantaka depicted on the front cover of this publication. The video starts out as if a video-lecture for kids, where a narrator speaks about the different objects held in the many arms of the god. Slowly and increasingly, neuroscientific explanations for the cause of anger in the human brain are used to interpret the mood of the different human-like heads of the Buddhist god. Meanwhile, electronic music of increasingly experi-mental kind fills the background of the work, creating a form of scientifically rooted electro-Buddhism.

Such work uses language to mix religion and science, but equally important is the atmosphere of the video. Lu Yang pay homage to things like craft and aesthetics: Concepts associated with early modern art. By creating works of high quality, it is easy to become immersed into the uni-verse of Lu Yang. She does not give you a final answer of what to think on the science versus religion debate. A de-bate which has increasingly been raging since the enlight-enment. Wrathfull Kingcore expresses a tension between the human need for spiritualism and the logic of scientific education today. In this way her work is cleansed for more moral preaching on science and technology as elements of “the future”, religion the past.

By existing as pure mediation inspired by documented science and religious beliefs, the work because a reflective practice. It does not give a final answer to the questions it raises, and it is up to the spectator to make sense of what is experienced. This approach to the topic of “post-human-ism” is needed in a time of increasingly commercialized, and unreflected, introduction of techno- scientific material in education and society as a whole. If we do not take care, these products can indeed become anti-human. What Lu Yang reveals is how popular culture is currently filled with unreflected references to popular science: References, which by their sheer amount become assimilated into lan-guage and the minds of people, impacting how we under-stand ourselves in relation to spiritualism and religion.

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Body Interiors

In Lu Yang’s music videos UterusMan and Cancer Baby we are exposed to biological phenomena taking place inside the human body. UterusMan matches the quality of commercial music video productions. By using this format, the work is relatable to people outside of concenvtional art-contexts. The hero, UterusMan, is genderless. To create super powers he modifies his own body: He can give birth to a baby weapon by turning his entire corpus into a giant uterus, given birth through the feet. He (or she, or both?) can modify the pelvis into a giant battle vehicle with a deep-throat skeleton laser canon attached.

In computer-games the player is the epicentre, the hero, and often in control of avatars with special powers. It is unclear whether UterusMan somehow takes place within the human body, or at some far-away universe: making the vision Lu Yang creates of the human body both near and far away. It is as flesh-like and intimate as it is foreign, bizarre and violent.

Nichols Agar has been writing about technological en-hancements of the human body in his book Humanitys End. According to him, the biological limitations of human bodies and brains have been central to how ethics and moral codex have developed in different cultures. The rules of sports only make sense because of our physical limitations. Chess is a game which makes sense because it requires mental training, and our physical ability to stay aware of the next move is what defines if we lose or win. Violence is punished, because it is felt and impacts the life of the victim due the physical sensitivity of the human body. The list of examples is near endless.

Cancer Baby is the personification of cancer cells from stomach to breast cancer who in ways similar to cartoons for children sing “we are cancer cells; we live inside your body”. When comparing Cancer Baby with Wrathtfull Kingcore I can’t help to think about a certain sense of in-doctrination. These two mentioned videos refer to child education and entertainment products combined.

If we step away from the post-human references the con-cept of “Anti-humanism” relates to, Martin Kemp is one of the most established art historians on Leonardo Dav-inchi. Based on his research, Kemp has published numer-ous books on how science and optical devices have changed how we see the world. Kemp does not mention “post-hu-manism” a single time, eventhough his subject is related to post-humanism. To Kemp, it is productive to take a sober visual analytical approach.

Based on on the theory of Kemp, Lu Yang’s work can be understood cultural products informed by a range of visu-alizations of the inner human body produced by modern science. Images have meanings tied to them, and by being able to visualize cells inside the huan body for example, the image of the Vitruvius Man created during the renais-sance is challenged. In Leonardo Da Vinchis Vitruvius Man we see the human body in its entirety encapsulated in a geometric system. This image has been influential on the visualization of human body since it was created in 1487. It siginifies a certain scientific, or mathematical, approach to understanding what it means to be human.

However, in Cancer Cells and UterusMan it is no longer the human body in its entirety, and its placement within this world, which define who we are. We are cells. We are mobile containers of biological organisms. Such view on humanity does (as proved by the writings of Kemp) not need to inherit any sense of anti-humanism or post-hu-manism: that we are composed of millions of individual living cells, which are capable of mutating and becoming alien to ourselves is a fact. It might be uneasy to fatholm, but its a scientific fact. This is why expressive works like Lu Yang’s are important. They allow us to meet our biolog-ical inner selves in artistic formats.

Since the renaissance and enlightenment art has become increasingly human-centered. The notion of art and the concept of humanity has gone hand-in-hand. This sug-ggests Anti-Humanism and Post-humanism are not as foreign to the original enlightenment and modern hu-manitarian projects as one might be led to believe. Perhaps there is something quite “natural”, spiritual and human-istic, in making art about bio- and computational- tech-nologies. It is important that we on a human scale, as we indiviudally experience, sense and think, develop aware-ness of the impact technologies have on our lives. Unless we want a truly anti-human future.

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To the left, the Vitruvius Man (est. 1487) by Leonardo Davinchi, courtesy of Luc Viatour / www.Lucnix.be. On this page, still-images from UterusMan (2013) by Lu Yang

Interview with Lu Yang and Vanessa Bartlett

By Rachel Marsden

Monday 19 January 2015

Rachel Marsden: It would be interesting to hear about the curator-artist relationship between you and Jakob. How long have you known him? How long has this show been in planning? What was his curatorial idea behind, and your understanding of, ‘ANTI-HUMANISM’?

LY: The first time I met Jakob was when he was working in Art Labor gallery in Shanghai. He started to like my works and a long time ago he talked with me about doing something together. He has put me in a group show in Denmark before, this time it was a solo focus.

RM: Why the title “ANTI-HUMANISM”?

LY: Jakob gave the name “anti-humanism” for this show. I asked him why. He said “Come on! Your works are not anti-humanism?!”. RM: Are the works “anti-humanistic” in nature? Or is it more a sub-narrative?

LY: I googled what this means. It’s something about sci-fi, future, man-machine…something that’s definitely in my works.Vanessa Bartlett: For me, the phrase implies something about humans becoming machines?

LY: Like to be a better “human”, maybe we just think we are the spirit in our body and the body is a machine.

LY: I think in our time, all the technology is just part of our life, it’s part of nature.

VB: Yes! I was thinking there is also something about cele-brating human fragility as well, like the threat of cancer is still part of our identity as human machines.

LY: Why do people isolate the technology and nature so clearly? Why not treat technology as it is now, as a day’s tool, like a painter uses a brush to paint a painting.

RM: The threat of biology as such?

LY: I’m interested in lots disease on human being, like Parkinson’s disease, cancer…

VB: Yes. I was thinking about Cancer Baby there obvious-ly.

LY: It’s always mentioned…we all will pass through the long history, the time…we just exist for a while…

VB: These illnesses are still part of our anti-human identi-ty, even if we have become machines.

LY: No matter how hard we try, you can’t escape death…

RM: …and it is the machines that try and save us.

LY: Machine is strong and hard, but still will be broken some day. Cancer is the most thing that most people dead because of it, it’s not a very special one, it’s just a repre-sentative.

RM: Can I ask why more recently, your works have become, less visually serious, and more playful, kitsch and game-like? LY: Yes, recently, I made some games. I want to say people think I’m a new media artist, but the only form I want to make is game. I’m tired of those stupid moving low tech interactive “new media art”, but there’s huge products out of contemporary art. I think that’s really “new media art”. It’s super…that form is game.

VB: I want to talk about your focus on medical imagery. It has become almost like a new form of truth for depicting and understanding illness and the inner workings of the body, however, there are schools of thought that start to critique practices such as neuroscience imaging for creat-ing one-dimensional understandings of human frailties, particularly mental health conditions such as depression. The problem with the technologies that create these portraits of the body is that they very often ignore the subjective and social aspects of illness. You seem to have a fascination with these kinds of images. Why are they so attractive to you?

LY: Those images are very objective as there’s no emotion inside them, visually. I use some cartoon images to make some very serious topics not that serious anymore.

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RM: Vanessa, I remember you spoke about Lu Yang’s prac-tice relating to bioart?

LY: Yes, bioart is very interesting. I like it because this is something related to every living thing no matter whether they are human or animals.

VB: One of the most fascinating elements of your work for me is the way that you exhibit such a strong interest in science, but retain quite a cynical attitude toward it (I’m thinking of Cancer Baby in particular here). In recent years, it has become very fashionable for artists to collab-orate with scientists to create works that we describe as ‘interdisciplinary’ or sometimes as ‘bioart’. But you spoke in an interview that you gave with Robin Peckham about bioart in China and the difficulties that you have had in trying to collaborate and crossover with scientists in that context.

LY: We don’t need any background of our country such as our political background…it seems there is not that big a gap between different audiences.

VB: Do you think of yourself as making ‘bioart’? And are you interested in working with scientists in a more formal way?

LY: Of course, making bioart is difficult. It is relative with lots high tech lab resources needed.

VB: Or is it important to you to have a more independent commentary on your subject matter? I’m asking because I know a lot of this kind of work is being made in the UK and Australia under the banner of ‘art-science’ collabo-ration. I was just wondering how it is in China. Perhaps you are able to take a more radical/playful view of science because you are not making a government-funded project?

LY If you are in China that means you can’t get some funding from government, no one support you do that and a gallery won’t want to support you to do some work that can’t be sold. All the titles are from outside, given to me, but I only think I’m just a little human, creating something to spend the rest of my time and life. I don’t even think I’m an artist.

RM: “A digital afterlife?”

LY: I really like some experiment from scientists as it’s much more interesting than art. I really want to be one of the but I’m not that smart, and haven’t such patience for it.

VB: I’ve felt that way before as well!

LY: All my more high tech work is not made in China. I either went to some residency program or museums from outside China supported me. I never found any support from government in China.

RM: I am interested in these outside relationships, and how they have influenced your practice? Do you see these collaborations as essential in moving your practice for-ward?”

LY: Yes. It began with my early work in diagrams and drawings about how to make some strange installations during studying at university. I had no money and no technology to do those works but didn’t want to give up just because I didn’t haven’t support so I made those dia-grams at first, sending them to some residency programs. The first place to accept me was Fukuoka Asian Art Muse-um who found many skilled people help me realise one of those diagrams into the Underwater Frog Leg Ballet.

RM: I remember visiting your studio in Shanghai in 2011 and seeing it then and your obsession with anatomical drawings and medical books.

LY: After this, I attended some other residency that really helped, but the most cool thing is to make work under other cool people’s help.

RM: So has drawing always been important in your prac-tice and in your exhibitions?

LY: The collaboration has really helped my whole art practice. Drawing is a way to show my ideas. It is impor-tant because when I can’t make it, I still have a way to tell people my thoughts.

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RM: Can we talk about how issues of physical and men-tal health are very underrepresented, not as discussed or acknowledged in China. The representation of physical and mental health in the media differs in China to other areas of the world. They are “hard to talk about” subjects glob-ally. What is your view on this? Is it harder to discuss these issues in China? Could you be censored? Are your works a way of commenting on this?

LY: I think physical and mental health is difficult to talk about in China, as people do not care about it too much, particularly mental health. People won’t talk about physical health as it is bad luck…dead and disease, those topics too. People think you are being ominous.

RM: So do people think you are doing that through your work when it is shown in china?

LY: In a very natural way I’m very interested in those “bad things”. I think that’s part of life. Some people really hate my works and I get a lot of bad comments under some of online videos of my works. Most people won’t speak face to face about them.

VB: I want to talk more of understanding and interpreting illness and taboo subjects. This question applies to China, but also probably more broadly too. In the work Wrathful King Kong Core you couple together medical imagery with a detailed portrait of one of the Buddhist gods of wrath. It uses computer generated images of the brain to give a detailed explanation of where anger and irritation originate, in an attempt to somehow superimpose scien-tific logic about the origin of emotions onto more ancient (religious) ways of making sense of the world. Medical and spiritual beliefs are at odds in many parts of the world, but I wonder if the battle between ancient and modern wisdom is particularly pronounced in some parts of China? Is this important for you? How does this tension influence your practice?

LY: Most topics in my work are showing the weak way of the human and for human that’s taboo, but in Buddhism that outlook is uncertain as you always have to think about yourself…death and weakness. There is no control.

VB: So by making serious illnesses light and playful in your work, you allude to the fact that we can’t control them? They are just a fact of life!

LY: In this work, I show both a belief in religion and science. Science gives you a lot of proof that you can see through your physical eyes, but religion affects your mind. It’s actually a stupid idea to put those two things together - how we believe in our physical body versus something we only know in spirit. Even when you have control, it will still be gone…the spirit is gone.

RM: Is all your work in a sense religious or spiritual then?

LY: Not all of them but each of them has some connection between.

RM: Can I ask about Cancer Baby and Uterusman? It seems like you are making the statement that healthcare is a commodity that it can be bought. It is almost a game in China and/or Globally? Is this what you mean?

LY: Uterusman is a Satire of gender, as I think, the human machine is controlled by the soul. I just think I’m a hu-man who is here to use this machine to realize something during my time living in this world. Not all my works are relative with gender. As I said, Cancer Baby is just a metaphor…that people all have disease, and many of them are already dead from it.

VB: Are there any other artists adopting this approach in China who in your opinion are making interesting and in-novative work about health issues and science? Who would you say are your peers or influences in this kind of area?

LY: Other artists I don’t know. I think everyone has their own interest area. I like B.F. Skinner, he is my favourite Psychologist as he is experimental. I like Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr too. They are my favourite bio artists. Oh and my favourite game is Athena’s Wrath.

RM: Interesting that your influences are so broad and far away from “contemporary art” as such, more in the examination of psychological and digital realities, never human. You are changing your realities all the time…and for audiences.

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2Top, Victimless Leather - A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific “Body” (2004) by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr

Bottom, Zombie Music Box- Underwater Frog Leg Balet (2011) by Lu Yang

How 8-bit music trumped anti-humanism

Essay by 8-bit guro and theorist Anders Carlsson (aka Goto80)

When practitioners of 8-bit music like me write about the genre, it is hard to ignore the skills and effort need-ed to make the music. To play 8-bit music you need to master a not-so-intuitive software interface in order to communicate with a computer chip, that in return pro-duces bleeping sounds from cheap digital logic. On or off, increase or decrease: These inputs are the basics of digital technologies, making it as if there is something timeless about 8-bit music, although it might seem really old: 30 years in digital terms is the equivalent of something like 1001011001010101011111101011 years.

8-bit music can be understood as a low-level cultural technique of music hacking, where different stories can be told. The sceptic might tell a story of nostalgia for videog-ames, where the composer makes simplistic music because the tool used doesn’t allow anything complex to be made. Indeed, that would be a normal story to tell if we believe that newer is better, and that new expressions require new technologies. It’s an almost logical story in a society that values quantitative increases over quality.

The most common one story about 8-bit music among academics, artists and journalists, however, puts the hu-man at the centre of attention. It sometimes has a similar narrative to an old monster movie. There is a hero who learns how to manipulate and finally control some sort of wild beast. Instead of a monster, the Obsolete Computer is a mysterious relic of old school digital consumerism that is nowadays hard to understand, both in terms of purpose and function. A young white male hero appears and tames a frightening thing with rational choices, and probably kills it with physical or symbolic violence. He achieves freedom and love and/or emancipation from capitalism or modern-ism or something. The end.

I should know, for I too have told this kind of story many times before. I started making music with 8-bit machines as a kid in the early 1990’s, when that was (almost) the normal thing to do. Thing is, I never stopped using them. Throughout the 2000’s, as 8-bit music started to intertwine with mass culture again because of the current retromania, people like me had to start explaining what we were doing. Journalists started to ask questions, promoters wanted bi-ographies that would spark an interest, art curators wanted the right concepts to work with, and so on.

So during the noughties, a collective story started to emerge among those of us who were making 8-bit music in what I have called the chipscene: a movement of peo-ple making soundchip-related music for records and live performances (rather than making sounds for games and demos as was done during the 80’s and 90’s).

The stories circulated around Commodore 64’s, Game-boys, Amigas and Ataris, Nintendo Entertainment Sys-tems, and other computers and game consoles from the 1980’s. We were haunted by the question “Why do you use these machines?” and although I never really felt like I had a good answer, we were at least pretty happy to talk about our passion for these machines, for a while anyway.

In comparison to many other music movements we spoke out about the role of technology, and we did it at the expense of music. We didn’t care much about the style and aesthetics of the music we made, because 8-bit music could be cute pop and brutal noise, both droney ambient and complex jazz. We didn’t care about the clothes we wore, or which drugs we took, or which artists we listened to. We formed a subculture based on a digital technology that uses 8 bits instead of 32 or 64, as modern machines do. Defining our music movement as “8-bit music” was a simplified way of explaining what we did. It was a way of thinking about medium and tech-nology intrinsic to some modern discourses on art. Like, anything you do with a camera is photography. Simple, but slightly ... pointless?

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Anders Carlsson performing as Goto80

The music somehow came in second, or maybe third. Sometimes the music we made almost became irrelevant. The idea of seeing someone on a huge stage with a Game-boy was sometimes enough. The primal screams of digital culture roaring on an over-sized sound system in a small techno club, was what we needed to get us going; even if it sounded terrible. Some of us were more famous than others, sure, but there wasn’t the same celebrity- and status- cults as in some of the “too-serious” 1990’s-style electronic music scenes. For us, the machines were the protagonist of the stories. Sometimes it was almost as if we – the artists who made the music – had been reduced to objects. It was as if the machines were playing us, and not the other way around. Yeah - very anti-human!

To be honest, not many people are willing to give up their human agency and identity, step back, and give full credit to the machine. Or even worse – have someone else do that for you. Well, I didn’t feel comfortable with it, at least.

People came up to as when we performed live to inter-rupt us and ask what games we were playing. Or perhaps requested some old song from a game: But for many of us, the entire movement of 8-bit music was not about the games of the 1980s. It was about the foundational compu-tational technologies and their expressions manifested as sounds.

It’s quite interesting how this came to be. How did 8-bit music become so dehumanized, when it involved quite a lot of human skills, techniques, knowledge and determina-tion? I think an important factor was when the chip-scene was threatened by outsider perspectives. In 2003, Malcolm McLaren, known for creating spectacles such as the Sex Pistols in the 1970’s, discovered 8-bit music. For him, this was the New Punk and he wrote a piece in Wired magazine about how the movement was against capital-ism, hi-tech, karaoke, sex, and mass culture in general:. Through the appropriation of discarded commodities, the DIY spirit, the raw and unadulterated aesthetics, etc.. On McLaren´s command, mainstream media started to report about 8-bit music, at least for 15 minutes or so.

To be fair, it was a good story – when Malcolm met 8-bit. But it pissed off plenty of people in the scene, because of its misunderstandings, exaggerations and non-truths. It did, however, play an important role in how the scene came to understand itself. McLaren’s story had stirred a controversy that made us ask ourselves “Well, if he’s wrong, then who’s right?”.

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Anders Carlsson performing as DATASLAV [Dataslave]

We didn’t really know, atleast not collectively. McLaren pushed the chip-scene into puberty, and it began to search for an identity.

I was somewhere in the midst of this, and contributed to the techno-humanist story that started to emerge. It was basically this: We use obsolete technologies in unintended ways to make new music that has never been done before. Voila. The machine was at the centre, but it was we, the humans, who brought the goods. We were machine-ro-mantic geniuses who figured out how to make “The New Stuff” despite the limitations of 8-bit technologies. It was machine-fetishism combined with originality and the classic suffering of the author. It was very cyber romantic, but with humans as subjects, machines as objects, and pop cultural progress at the heart of it. It could be a story of fighting capitalist media. All in all: pretty good fluff for promotional material!

Over time, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the narratives forming around 8-bit. In 2007, I was asked to write a chapter for Karen Collins’ book From Pac Man to Pop Music. I researched the history of 8-bit music and realized the current techno-centric view of 8-bit music was a rather new idea. In the 1980’s there wasn’t any popular word for 8-bit music. Basically all home computer music was 8-bit, so there was no need to differentiate between 8, 32 and 64- bits as there is today. That changed in the 1990’s, when the increase of hi-tech machines created a need for popular culture to differentiate between differ-ent forms of home computer systems and the music they made.

The term chip-music appeared to describe music that sounded like the 1980’s computer music. It mimicked not only the technical traits of the sound chips, but also the aesthetics and compositional techniques of the 1980’s computer composers.

So 1990’s chipmusic wasn’t made with 8-bit machines. The term was mostly used for music made with contemporary machines (Amigas and IBM PCs) that mimicked music from the past. It wasn’t about taking something old and making something new. It was more like taking something new and making something old. In other words: not very good promotional fluff.

I realised something. The techno-determinist story of “an-ything made with sound-chips is chipmusic” was ahistori-cal, anti-cultural, and ultimately: anti-human. Sure, there was something very emancipating about saying “I can do whatever I want and still fit into this scene that I’m part of”. That’s quite ideal if many ways, when you think about it.

Problem is – it wasn’t exactly like that. Plenty of people made 8-bit or soundchip music that wasn’t understood as such. The digital hardcore music of the 1990’s that used Amigas. The General MIDI heroes of the 1990’s web. The keyboard rockers around the world, who were actually using soundchips.

So for me it became important to explore chipmusic as a genre, rather than just a consequence of technology. If it’s not just a consequence of technology, then what is it? How were these conventions created, and how do they relate to politics, economics and culture?

This is what I tried to give answers to in my master thesis in 2010. Looking back at it now, what I found was that it was actually quite easy to not make chipmusic with 8-bit technology. I mean, if you would hook a monkey straight into an 8-bit soundchip, it’s not like there would be chipmusic. It would be more like noise glitch wtf. Stuff. Art. I don’t know. But not chipmusic. Chipmusic was more about how you used the software that interfaced you and the hardware soundchip. So I tried to figure out how this worked for me, and more importantly, for the people I interviewed for my thesis. How and why do we adapt to this cultural concept of what non-human “raw computer music” sounds like?

I am still recovering from this process. During this time my music became increasingly abstract and theoretical. I started to move away completely from danceable and melodic music, and got more interested in structures and the process of composing music, rather than the results of it. I wanted to rebel against the conventions that I was researching, and find something less human, less boring, less predictable.

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But at the same time, I wanted to prove that we don’t need hi-tech machines to make non-boring music. I despise the idea that we need new technologies to make new things. And I am super conservative in that I, in some way, believe in things like craft, quality, and originality. In some way.

So I was trying to find my own synthesis between me and the machine. Since I am not a programmer, I didn’t work with generative systems like many post-human composers do. I kept a firm focus on the craft of making music. For example, I started to make completely improvised live-sets without any preparations. I got up on stage, turned on a Commodore 64, showed it on a beamer, loaded the def-MON-software, and made all the instruments and compo-sition in front of the eyes and ears of the audience.

I like this a lot because it’s hard work (for me) and it gives surprising results (for me). It’s a bit similar to live coding, if you’ve heard about that, but with a less sophisticated approach, I suppose. It’s more like manual labour than coding. Typing hundreds of numbers and letters by hand, instead of telling the computer to do it. You have to do it “by hand” which opens up for different mistakes compared to when it’s automatized. Which leads to surprises, which leads to new approaches.

I am not in full control, nor do I want to be. Or, more correctly, I don’t think I can be. I agree with the media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s ideas that we can never fully grasp or relate to what a computer is, and how it works. It is a thing on its own, and it deserves respect for what it is. We should not say that it has certain intended uses – like a “game computer” – because that is just semantic violence that in the long run reinforces the material censorship of Turing complete machines into crippled computers;, like smartphones.

I think that whatever we use these things we call computers for, is okay. And most of us have odd solutions to make technology do what we want, even if we are not program-mers. Olia Lialina calls it a Turing complete user – s/he who figures out how to copy-paste text in Windows through Notepad to remove the formatting, and individu-als have these weird procedures of how to make Microsoft Word not fuck up your whole text.

What I mean is: even if I make sounds that people say “go beyond the capabilities of the machine”, I don’t see myself as the inventor of those sounds, nor do I think that they go beyond the machine. They were always there, just like Heidegger would say that the statue was already inside the stone before the stone carver brought it forth.

Yeah, I suppose it’s some sort of super-essentialist point of view, and I’m not sure what to make of it to be honest. But I like how it mystifies technology, rather than mysti-fiying human “creativity”. The re-mystification of tech-nology is great, and the demystification of the author is important. What if the author is just doing stuff, and not fantastic art? What if it’s just work?

My Dataslav performance plays with this question. I sit in a gallery, and people tell me what kind of song they want, and I have to fulfil their wish in no more than 15 minutes. I turn myself into a medium or perhaps more correctly: a medium worker. I mediate what other people want, but it takes skills and effort to do it. It’s perhaps craft, not art. Or maybe it’s just work. Work that I don´t get paid to do, like so many other “cultural” workers in the digital arts sector.

If the potentials are already present in the technology, and we humans are there to bring it forth, that kind of chang-es things, doesn’t it? We don’t really produce things by adding more stuff to it. We are more like removing things: Subtraction rather than addition.

And if that’s the case, then it’s obviously much better to use something where we don’t need to subtract so much to make something that most people didn’t already do. If everything is possible, which some people still believe to be the case with some technologies, then that’s a whole lot of stuff to delete to get to the good stuff!

So, start deleting. It’s our only hope.

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Jakob Kudsk Steensen is an artist and curator. He is temporarily full-time assistant curator at Brandts Museum in Denmark, and he is a graduate from Copenhagen University and Central St. Martins. Having an interdisciplinary approach to art, his works have been re-cently been shown at London Science Museum and Ok Corral. He is based in Copenhagen and New York, and in his work as a curator he foucses on contemporary media art in China. His writings have been featured in the newspaper Information, ARKITEKTEN and in various online publications. He has presented his art-related research as symposiums on art and science or digital media in London and Stockholm. ANTI-HUMANISM is Jakob’s first larger solo-curated show in Denmark. It has already been well received and men-tioned as a must-see by art critic Torben Sangild in Politiken.

www.jksteensen.comjk.steensen@gmail.com

Lu Yang is one of the most renowned young media artists out of China. She is educated from China Academy of Arts, New Media Department. Throughout the past couple of years, she has exhibited at multiple museums, galleries and exhibition spaces internation-ally such as Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, WALLPKAY in New York and Artlabor 2.0 in China. Her work revolves around intersections of digital popular culture, biology, technology, spiritualism and control. Her work is critically acclaimed in numerous art-reviews. In 2014 she has been a resident at AACC in New York and Symbiotica in Australia. ANTI-HUMANISM is Lu Yang´s first show in Denmark.

http://luyang.asia/

Vanessa Bartlett is a researcher, writer and curator currently based between London, Liverpool and Sydney, Australia. She is a PhD candidate at University of New South Wales, where her research explores digital art as a way of prompting audiences to reflect on their own mental health in the gallery space. Vanessa’s writing has featured in The Guardian and she has given lectures internationally in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Helsinki, as well as at prestigious UK venues like Tate Liverpool, The Arnolfini and The Science Museum, London. In the past she has worked as a researcher and producer for two of the UK’s most exciting digital media festivals: Futu-reEverything, Manchester and Abandon Normal Devices (part of the programme at FACT, Liverpool). She has also curated a number of successful exhibitions, including Slowness at Red Wire Gallery, which was highlighted as a must see exhibition by Times critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston.

www.vanessabartlett.comTwitter @vanessabartlett

Rachel Marsden is a transcultural curator, cultural producer, and art consultant specializing in Chinese and Asian contemporary art, (self )publishing and interpretive translation based in the UK. She “connects the dots that people can’t see” through developing profes-sional and social transcultural relationships, networks of understanding between diverse creatives and cultures, specifically China and the UK. She is founder and curator of ‘The Temporary’, a new transcultural exchange platform examining “temporary” and ephemeral experience in art, architecture, design, music, sound, performance and culture between the UK and China. Currently, she is Assistant Director (Research Fellow) for the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA) (Birmingham, UK, and China) and was recently Research Curator (2012-2014) for the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) (Manchester, UK). She is in her final stages of PhD studies at Birmingham City University in association with the CCVA, critically examining the global translation, through interpreta-tion, of contemporary Chinese art since 1980. As an arts writer, she contributes to various in-print and online magazines and academic journals including ‘Randian (randian-online.com)’ and ‘Art Radar Asia (artradarjournal.com)’, and works as copy editor for books and exhibition catalogues worldwide.

www.rachelmarsden.co.ukhttp://rachelmarsdenwords.wordpress.comemail@rachelmarsden.co.ukTwitter @rachmarsdenInstagram @rachel_marsden

Anders Carlsson Aka.Goto80 is a lo-fi artist and researcher who has been called “the most prolific chip music artist” (Computer Music Magazine). Since his first steps in the demoscene 1992 he has developed his own mix of pop, beats and craft. He is currently focusing on live improvisation and text graphics together with Raquel Meyers, and they have performed at Transmediale and Bonniers Konsthall. Goto80 also runs the blog/label Chipflip, the text graphics research blog text-mode.tumblr.com, and internet2008.se. He has played/exhibited at Transmediale, MOMI in New York, Gogbot, Mapping Festival, Blip Tokyo, Hultsfred Festival and hundreds of other locations.

http://goto80.com/info@goto80.com