Meeting #9: How to Surgically Exorcise with Technology?

The ninth meeting of the “Planet Marx” reading club was launched jointly by Long March Project and the Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), and delved into the mind of popular culture by means of two experimental methods: a “spirit path” and a “reading path”. The exploration of these two deep spaces was led separately by artists and curators, focused on disenchanting participants from the discourse of technology.

On the “spirit path”, Planet Marx convened an event on the afternoon of November 10^th from 13:00-18:30 during which the fifteen participants entered into the depths of their consciousness and “did work” during a 5.5 hour “sonic driving” session of shamanistic drumming. This shaman drumming workshop was collaboratively developed by the artists Chen Yinru and Lin Lichun, utilizing shamanistic methods to search for answers to the collective questions facing the future of mankind. During the workshop, Lin Lichun guided participants into the domain of witchcraft, while the audience learned from themselves and ask questions about artificial intelligence.

Simultaneous to this, Planet Marx invited the curator of the McaM exhibition “Mind the Deep: Artificial Intelligence and Artistic Creation”, Long Xingru to lead Reading Club participants in discussions on her longstanding interest in the existence of artificial intelligence technologies, together with Long March Project researcher Zian Chen. Long Xingru and Zian Chen began with a discussion of the work of the scholar Matteo Pasquinelli and his idea of the “three thousand year” deep history of artificial intelligence, followed by a mind-opening discussion of the works in the “Mind the Deep” exhibition. For the final portion of the Reading Club, the two separate groups of Planet Marx participants met for dialogue and sharing.

Click here for a summary of this session