Local/Translocal: The Reproduction of Technological Promise
Saturday 18 September 2021, 1 - 2.30pm
A panel discussion exploring the ways in which technological optimism, power and sovereignty are reproduced on transnational scales, initiated by Chisenhale’s Asymmetry Curatorial Writing Fellow, Hang Li. Hang will be joined by communication and media researcher Jing Zeng, sociology and public policy researcher Canhui Liu, writer and curator Su Wei, and curator and academic Joni Zhu.
The discussion will explore the construction and exchange of technology between China and other countries. The panellists will examine technology as social and cultural phenomena that embody ideas of labour organisation, ideologies and the imaginations of power, contributing to the maintenance and transformation of nationalism, financialisation, and governance.
Following the public panel discussion, a group of researchers, curators and artists with different knowledge backgrounds joined the core group in a closed-door roundtable discussion. The micro-gathering reflected upon topics and questions raised from the panel discussion, sharing research interests in technology, labour, governance, social movements, diaspora studies and colonialism. The participants further explored the crossroads and shared struggles among some distanced disciplines and discourses, cross-examining topics of technology, locality, identity, and hope.