The ambiguity between the real space-time and its representation is deliberately rendered in experimental mockumentary Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Each Other, which films with realistic austerity the process of crafting an exact replica of a custom-confiscated ivory tusk. With the camera aimed at the objects and the hands that manipulate them, the replica’s details and textures are an impeccable replication at high granularity, and even the original’s imperfections were copied perfectly on the replica. An object that hasn’t experienced a specific history has registered the marks left by that history. There is one scene where the original ivory…
A person with VR lens on is a mime artist of the digital age.
Two houses that can be almost the same otherwise.
On a full-moon night, the night of August 3rd, 2020, I slept en plein air for the first time. There was so much that I didn’t know or expect.
The air was cooled after it stopped raining on August 2nd, so I thought it was perfect timing for my long-waited first night on the roof. My unit is in a three-story condo, or a triple decker, typical for the city where I live. The back staircase leads to a ladder where the rooftop has always been accessible. One commonality about all triple deckers is that they are decades old. The…
A concept and an object.
Concept
- Name: Otherness
- Origin and Brief Explication:
The origin of this concept is the essay “the Myth of the Other” by Zhang Longxi. The Other is created in a relative sense. It is the culture, nation or civilization different from which one identifies with. Foucault remarks observantly that one’s way of sensing and judging is so deeply rooted in the collective history to which one belongs that one ceases to be conscious of that. But he also states, in contradiction, that one enjoy art and music of many different cultures and historical periods…
The infinity of a cityscape does not comply with the laws of physics. An individual’s world system can be an infinitely small subdivision.
Fragment One
You live in such a city: there are only two types of buildings, buildings that are immutable and those that are rotatory, and they look monotonously similar. Inns, offices, hospitals, and other basic sedentary venues are immutable; transportation hubs, markets, churches, and such venues that evoke physical or spiritual passage or multi-directional availability are rotatory. You have always lived in this city and have never seen or even imagined any alternative urban and social structures.
…
This is my very first Medium post, so it has both the privilege and the burden of introducing who I am, and what this blog is about. Let me begin by a candid narrative of a series of relevant anecdotes, after which I will introduce one of my self-portraits, in lieu of a formal self-introduction. Since I began to use a smart phone, I became a heavy user of the memorandum. I wrote down ideas, reflections, research questions, and epiphanies in my phone’s memos everywhere, every now and then. Without realizing, I was doing something that I would keep doing…
Yiou Wang
Detection X Reflection | Blog of an architect who would have been a comparative anthropologist in a parallel world
