Can I Touch You Through the Screen?
Author: Zeng Hong
Do you remember the once popular concept of the ‘global village’?
In early autumn of 1988, right before the Seoul Olympics, Nam June Paik first used video technology and music to ‘wrap up’ the whole world. From the United States, Israel, Soviet Union, West Germany, South Korea, Japan to China, Paik’s live video crossed the Iron Curtain of the Cold War, delivering pop icons of the 1980s to the TV screens of 500 million global viewers.
They could hear David Bowie greet Ryuichi Sakamoto in Japanese over the video link, Cui Jian sing the prelude to Chinese rock and roll, a tribute concert to Brahms held in a parking garage in Hamburg where the composer was born, and see how video art used lasers, superimposition, multi-screens and pixelation to further rhythmize the visual representation of modern dance. Looking back 30 years later, are you also envious of that generation’s audience, who could be so hopeful about mass media connecting all of humanity's future?
The electronic technologies connected not just people with people, but also people with pets. In the winter of 1996, the Japanese company Bandai released Tamagotchi, which we liked to call ‘digital pets’. Children back then became the first generation to form an intimate bond with an electronic product. Inside the red and green plastic eggs lived a little ‘creature’ that could smile, get annoyed, and more. Can you imagine? Just like caring for a cat or dog, you could feed, play with, clean up after, and tend to the health and mood of the digital pet every day. These digital pets also had different personalities—the more you played with them, the more in-sync you became.
The experiment of establishing relationships between people and electronics thus subtly infiltrated our daily lives in the form of play. And our slightly naive selves back then believed that technology would definitely deepen our connections with the environment around us, just like the children caressing their digital pets through the screen, the invention of digital pets to satisfy their emotional needs.
But is this really the case? Have you noticed that at some point, we lost the habit of ‘bumping into’ or quietly waiting for a friend? We use WhatsApp, Messenger, and even Instagram to make plans to meet someone at a specific time and place. We’ve eliminated the waiting, avoided the anxiety and restlessness of waiting, but also missed out on the excitement and anticipation. Remember how the Little Prince’s fox enjoyed the feeling of growing more and more eager as it waited for their meeting?
One winter afternoon in 2006, Pak Sheung Chuen put on a red jacket, hoping to bring some warmth to a friend he would ‘bump into’ at the Kowloon Tong MTR station. Four hours later, a friend who happened to be there was told ‘I've been waiting here for you for a long time!’. Pak used the mindset of a little fox to resist Hong Kong’s increasingly rapid-paced, social media-immersed city with the simplest act of ‘waiting’.
With the prevalence of dating apps today, it seems we can no longer form intimate relationships without digital technology. Has the occurrence of destiny shifted from chance encounters in physical space to algorithmically derived matches in virtual space? Can online romance really be equivalent to intimacy in real life?
Have you also received misaddressed emails from strangers before? Did you open them to read carefully and speculate about the story between the sender and recipient? If so, then you may have done something similar to Cheng Ran in 2014, imagining their emotional entanglements against the backdrop of Beethoven’s torrential piano music. What exactly happened between them that ultimately led the recipient to delete the sender? The disjointed sentences and internet slang make you wonder if the sender was like that young woman in red, wandering aimlessly through Amsterdam, with a blank yet intoxicated look, recklessly revelling in the passion of youth while also falling into utter despair. The rough texture of Super 8 film makes the ambiguous lights, liquids, and casino chips appear even more cheap and tawdry, while the sender’s unrestrained confessions paired with Beethoven’s 21st Piano Sonata become increasingly maudlin. Is this ‘love’ conveyed through fractured words across screens in the digital age? It’s like the plane circling over the woman’s head—rapidly taking off, then, possibly, suddenly crashing.
In contrast, in 2016’s South Korea, intimacy between people was perhaps not so important. Because digital technology seems able to satisfy your every desire more tirelessly and selflessly than real people. Young-Hae Heavy Industries does not believe in intimacy between people, they only ‘worship’ South Korea's ‘beacon of technology’, Samsung. With the huge, flashing text on screen, they move you with their intense, unrestrained ‘confession’ of love for Samsung. Half a century ago, Nabokov viewed the young girl Lolita as the ‘light of [his] life, the fire of [his] loins’, but you find that the object of life and desire today has become the tech giant Samsung. It wakes you up in the morning, informs you of anything new under the sun, and keeps you company through long nights. It is everywhere, it is capable of anything. It is your lover, your hero, yesterday, today, and forever. It has already developed its own subjectivity and is gradually replacing the increasingly pale human soul. No wonder Young-Hae Heavy Industries believes that those who believe in Samsung will have everlasting life.
You, me, we are all swaying along to weird jazz music in this techno-worshipping cult, paradoxically trying to touch each other's souls—if there are any left—through the screen.