Vivien Zhang – Manifesto

Vivien Zhang’s project Manifesto Manifested is a continually evolving text, reconstructed with every exhibition. The text adopts a contradictory and ironic tone, and plays with the conditions and paradoxes of our time. Themes explored in the manifesto are central to the artist’s practice. Begun in 2018 and now in its third iteration, the manifesto questions and reflects a society in constant and ever-changing flux.

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We trust, for we will be able to rely on computation and automation.

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They will be the new divine authority which grants us certainty: Certainty → stability to the extent of stagnation and regression Certainty → eliminates the accidental that is the principle for discovery and evolution

The Future
This future is the median of our past as the prototype to project our future is a model based only on known past evidence.

Biases

With computation and automation, we will be able to rely on confirmation biases and automation biases; we will be shielded from sources of distress that come with unpredictability; we shall be alleviated from the burden of cognition! Bygone will be the arduous efforts to perceive, evaluate, reason, and resolve. Sentimental obstacles will be pacified, unsubstantiated instincts will no longer be valid.

Desensitisation
Repetition and over-iteration make redundant that which is rehearsed over and over again. Gone are the unexpected, the abrupt, and the extra-ordinary. In this future we will rejoice without uncertainties, without anomalies, and is unaccountable for the unknowns.

Errors

The Extension of our current existing selves → errors will be repeated and magnified, errors will be augmented, errors will become history and fact. We are moulded by consensus and the idea of uniqueness becomes redundant.

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Opinion

Popular opinion, surely, is the true opinion! We shall finally acknowledge that truth is the quantitative collective agreement, the mean of a racked up sample.

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Todays borders

It is the Internet, the avenue of information, that licenses the real borders today – not fences, nor walls. So we shall fall into harmony within oblivious echo chambers – and must cultivate the silos that validate our incompatible opinions! We shall follow the order of # followings, r/ subs, individual mandates, and so forth. We shall meander within an inexhaustible cascade of memes and a myriad of portals into the lives of others. Like never before, we are able to interject ourselves into a multitude of communities. Surely, this marks a window of opportunity to overhaul singularity with that of intersectionality!

Data banks

All data shall be cached in a deep, cavernous memory bank, where fragments of memory can be drawn, cited, implicated and applied to our advantage, anytime, anywhere. We shall surrender our right to disappear, to remove, hide, or simply leave. This is a quintessential ‘immortality project’, albeit somewhat unsolicited.

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Standstill Timeline

Authenticity is what we authorise ourselves to borrow and appropriate from different instances of time. At last, we are able to opt for any point in historical time. In fact, the continuum has become pseudo-progressive. There are no more stylistic milestones, marking the collapse of a linear timeline. So rather, we must now consider, what can we de-contextualise, re-contextualise, and insert into this standstill timeline?

Unlearning

We will annihilate the social construct that is chronological history, as only a temporal phases shall remain! Temporal hierarchies will be disturbed. And let us efface bitter attributions, as hyper-determination – gender, race, and class – has been the source of throbbing fissures of society. Unlearning and de-intellectualisation. To disturb is to deconstruct, to deconstruct is to suspend, and to suspend is to unbind, thwarting pre-determinations for a more impartial future.

Faith in Fakes

The artifices of our times comfort us. We are inhabitants of an enhancement society – ‘entrepreneurial revolutions’ equate to minute modifications of existing ideas. And progress is represented by a constant past-sizing of the new. We have been enchanted – by illusions (of social media) and further facsimiles of these illusions – but at what cost?

The poor have not been deprived of their jobs. Instead, they are again made wage slaves. Amazon Mechanical Turks scavenge the debris of contemporary society: filtering offensive rubble, flagging shocking clips, and counterfeiting automatic identities to sooth our desire for autonomy. Technology and its systems parade in disguise as levelling tools. Yet just the same, they are authors of further inequity and new jailhouses for the poor. These are the ultimate artificial artificial intelligence.

Gazing at us from this pyramid is also the information broker who possesses sovereignty. Embellished with OAuth, savvy brokers today control accessibility, offering us keys of access through ‘safe’, ‘delegated access points’: CAPTCHA, multi-factor authentications, biometrics... only for the price of a fragment of our identity and integrity.

Today is the product of The Happiness Industry. In this domain, brokers are modern archaeological financiers, excavating from us new assets – namely our habitual choices – and erecting new markets for these new commodities. The upper crust of this new market is composed of positive feedbacks and thumbs ups.

Yet unbeknownst to us, pending detection underneath the crust of happiness lies even more valuable an asset – namely the vast range of sentiments such as dislikes and disapprovals – ready to be quarried.

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We live in a time that is anxious, schizophrenic, fractionalised, branched, divorced, split, distributed, and inconsistent. New privileges of this enhanced geography come with the collateral damage of distraction.

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Inspirations: examples include the mathematical shape Gömböc, Central Asian kilims, “manicules” found in early European manuscripts, and spiral columns from Baroque churches.