Meeting #1: How Does Planet Earth Become a Sensor?

Planet Marx

Time: March 21, 2019

Location: Long March Space, Beijing

Guest speakers: Zhao Yao, Wang Yijia

Long March Project (LMP) hosted the first of a series of Planet Marx Reading Club meetings at Long March Space. The session was titled “How Does Planet Earth Become a Sensor”, and artist Zhao Yao, Tsinghua Tongheng Urban Planning & Design Institute researcher Wang Yijia, and LMP researcher Zian Chen introduced selected texts.

Planet Marx Reading Club is particularly concerned with the intersections of disparate fields and subjects where complex issues often arise. In this discussion, we talked about the coalescence of politics and technology and the convergence of biology and technology. The author out of our selected texts that spurred the most debate and discussion was Benjamin Bratton whose text looks at science fiction, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence in an inspirational uninhibited and imaginative manner. What we aspire to do is compare and explore the interconnections between different subjects and disciplines of most relevance to contemporary culture: we will cover topics from celestial phenomena to geological change, from urban landscape to digital space. At every one of these confluences where one subject meets another, links as well as contradictions surface, impelling us to reflect upon our own temporality.

Click here for a summary of this session