Cancelling Noise, Bringing in Voices. Liu Chuang’s exhibition ‘Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities’ at Nida Art Colony

As I write this, my wrists are in pain. Along with billions of other people, my fingers slide for countless hours across a track pad. Aches in the forearms have become universal: technology brings connectivity into our lives, together with pain in our joints. The first cases of connecting technology-induced forearm inflammation appeared among the early telegraph workers, whose fingers one by one refused to tap the machine. This is also the starting point for the three-channel video installation Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities, a complex 40-minute kaleidoscopic narrative by Liu Chuang, which is currently presented in his solo show at Nida Art Colony. Soon, according to the video installation, the users themselves become workers in the virtual hard-to-track economy, in which reckless tapping and scrolling is immediately monetised. When the economy and the infrastructure become increasingly virtual, control systems are more difficult to trace. But that would be a moralising dystopian narrative, which Liu Chuang is not interested in pursuing. Virtuality also opens up loopholes for slipping away from control, for feeding on control mechanisms, and the infrastructure itself.

Just as in so-called Zomia (a term coined by the historian Willem van Schendel to describe a specific region in the Southeast Asian Massif, comprising nearly a hundred million marginalised people), ethnic minorities have avoided full control by a more powerful state by maintaining their rich oral culture and nomadic lifestyle, so contemporary bitcoin miners move their equipment around according to the seasons. During the dry season in Sichuan, they relocate to the wind farms of Xinjiang. In the spring, they move to the coal-fired power stations of Inner Mongolia; and then back again to Sichuan, one of the largest hydropower generators in the region. Virtuality is not only ambiguous in terms of control, it is also apparent: it cannibalises heavy-duty infrastructures, like mining, metallurgy, dams, and human and non-human labour. It also has sound, or to be more precise, noise. The noise of the bitcoin mining equipment that the nomadic miners use is so loud that they are forced to use various noise-diffusing technologies to reduce it. Only the noise of the river in the hydro-electric power station is louder.

Sound-music-noise is the thread that ties together the disparate patches of the film’s narrative. It resurfaces and disappears again, just as sound does. But in the end, it becomes more and more present, not just as a mere background or a fragment here or there; it encompasses all the ambiguity, all the dialectical relationship of virtuality and technology, virtuality and control, virtuality and survival. To present this complexity, Liu Chuang borrows excerpts from Hollywood movies, such as Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and Solaris by Tarkovsky, as well as found footage and drone camera imagery. When early anthropologists subjected various ethnic groups to their research in an asymmetrical relationship in order to make their field recordings of oral culture, they could not have dreamt that these voices would form an infinite pool of sonic ghosts, reappearing again and again like the lost wife of the astronaut Kevin in Solaris. The whole film by Chuang is narrated in one such ghostly tongue, Muya, a language related to Tibetan. This idea brought to mind Susan Hiller’s piece Lost and Found (2016), presented at Documenta 14 in Kassel, where extracts from sound archives of dying or extinct languages are visualised in schematic waves on the screen. Ghosts resurface, addressing you through technology. A narrative similar to Chuang’s film is also told in the movie The Tree House (2019), directed by Trương Minh Quý, which shows how, due to industrialisation, the Kor and Ruc ethnic minorities were forcibly relocated from their dwelling places in mountain caves to newly established villages in the lowlands, thereby slowly losing their language and survival skills, and finally, their identity.

By the end of Chuang’s film, the sound-identity-technology relationship is even more intertwined. He shows how the Chinese authorities introduced a typical shanzai multimedia entertainment system to the ethnic minorities of Zomia, encompassing all possible forms of entertainment and connectivity: television, radio, DVD, EVD, karaoke, Bluetooth and WiFi. These systems act as ‘noise-cancelling’ technologies, devouring and assimilating the distinct voices and the identities of the antagonistic people of Zomia. Sound familiar? Being drowned in the flow of optimistic entertainment seeping into one’s private space through radio and television in the Soviet era? To survive through sound, to control through sound, to immortalise through sound, to paralyse through sound: all these processes act in unison, and we need to know how to navigate them accordingly.

The video ends with archive photographs of women in traditional Mongolian wedding dress, slowly mutating into Padmé Amidala in a similar costume in the aforementioned episode of Star Wars. From archive into fiction, from one form of character into another. It is hard to assimilate someone and something that has been virtual for a long time: while empires hunt down and tame those who do not act according to their agendas, the lured and threatened ones find their way unbeknown to the controlling eye. They feed their mobile existence on the phantoms of the material infrastructure of empires.