ARTIST OF THE MONTH

“My work starts with impossible problems“

PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT (PROSPECTUS), 2018 - excerpt

We were introduced to Liu´s work by LACMA Art + Technology Lab a few years ago and have been following her work ever since. This week she is participating in the independent biennial Alt_Cph. Liu will read from the publication A Better Life For The Workers, originally an internal training manual for female factory workers in Shenzhen. The monolog is featured in Gold Loop (Triad), 2020 the latest part of her ongoing project Pink Slime Caesar Shift. At The LACMA Art + Technology Lab she combines genetic engineering and labor activism to investigate the production of synthetic meat and highlight the plight of women workers in South China. As part of the project, Liu is prototyping wearable sculpture/accessories and develop 3D animations to connect the public to her explorations into the transference of genetic messages.

At her website Liu states: “My work starts with impossible problems, and the attempt to solve them. I research the socioeconomic and political conditions surrounding these problems, and build speculative narrative resolutions that reveal the latent desires embedded within. Origin fantasies – about nation, gender, and economy – can be manipulated and juxtaposed in ways that reveal unexpected convergences. “Minor stories”, such as safety tutorials, governmental standards, and small objects of feminized hygiene - reveal the nuances of the “major stories” of globalization and exploitation”.

An online conversation and reading with visual artist Jen Liu.

30/08 2020 16:00-17:30

PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT (PROSPECTUS), 2018
Single-channel 4K video
Running Time: 24:20

Pink Slime Caesar Shift is a video integrating live action and animation, whose premise is four proposals to alter the DNA of mass-produced in-vitro hamburgers to carry secret messages of labor insurrection on behalf of Special Economic Zone factory workers in China.

In the last decade, labor protests have increased in China, but they remain brief and localized, due to the government’s clampdown on social media. Large scale labor organizing is stymied by the inability to communicate across distances. Meanwhile, China’s resource capacity has maxed out, and shortages of beef – resulting in counterfeit beef scandals and imbalanced international trade deals– have become commonplace.

If the solution to the latter problem – meat shortage – is the production of synthetic meat originating in cow stem cells (already in development), its workflow would be ideal for solving the former problem – creating channels of communication for political organization – through altering the meat’s DNA as a data carrier. I have identified four feasible methods to do so – and will be developing biological samples exemplifying these methods throughout 2018.

One resource problem resolves another: new methods for grassroots communication via food distribution networks, attends a new source of meat for the table. But the video itself is a message carrier, connecting the speculative proposal with the reality of SEZ workers today. Each “method” speaks of various facets of the so-called Floating Population, legal and medical fugitives to a system that renders their bodies a secret subscript to global industrial production. To that end, I have translated and integrated multiple worker education documents, weaving it in amongst scientific equipment sales pitches, documentary recordings, and poetics on intimate estrangement.

PROSPECTUS:
Below are basic principles guiding each proposal, specificities of context and methods of detection/decoding will be modeled over the coming months.

PROPOSAL 1/4: Fluorescent markers for long-term DNA data storage of documents on official labor policy and legal case histories. Often workers do not know their legal rights, making them vulnerable to exploitation.

PROPOSAL 2/4: Microinjection of middle-length documents about labor advocacy organizational structure. Often workers do not know who to reach out to, should they need an advocate, or to spread information and organize direct action.

PROPOSAL 3/4: Biolistic delivery through gene gun: shooting microparticles carrying messages of strike and other methods of large-scale protest in a semi-timely manner at a later stage of production.

PROPOSAL 4/4: Transfection through virus: introduction of “flies” into the “ointment”. Despite needs for large-scale networks of communication, there is still need for smaller-scale channels: in this case, to pass word between workers in a regional zone to undertake a campaign of insurrection: breaking water towers, cutting power lines, and other acts of productivity subversion.
 

CREDITS

Direction, Props, Sound, and Editing
Jen Liu

Director of Photography
Daisy Zhou

Second Camera, Audio Engineer
Sam Richardson

Production Assistant
Soo A Kim

Bionaut
Mini Zhang

Lab Workers Internationale
Ziyi Li
Ingrid Zhang

SEZ Stalkers
Kathy Cho
Shoko Fujita
Nina Ki
Ziyi Li
Fredi Lumyi
Ingrid Zhang

Voiceover
Corey Tazmania

VOICEOVER TEXTS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
Anne Carson, Red Doc>, 2013
Sentience Politics, “Cultured Meat: An Ethical Alternative to Industrial Factory Farming”, 2016.
Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, 2016.
PHYS.ORG, “The mysterious 98%: Scientists look to shine a light on the ‘dark genome’”, February 3, 2017.
Promega, “NanoLuc® Luciferase: Redefining Reporter Assays”, 2017.
Worker Empowerment, A Better Life for the Workers (internal education materials), 2016. workerempowerment.org/en/
Corey Tazmania, couples counselor for Tarkovsky’s Stalker and wife (studio improvisation), 2017.
Tom W. Bell, “How Special Economic Zones are Quietly Advancing Freedom,” Foundation for Economic Education, April 11, 2017.
Aihwa Ong, “The China Axis: Zoning Technologies and Variegated Sovereignty,” Journal of East Asian Studies 4, 2004.
Labour Action China, “The Poisonous Pearl: Occupational Chemical Poisoning in the Electronics Industry in the Pearl River Delta, People’s Republic of China,” 2016. brotfueralle.ch/content/uploads/2017/07/160905_SOMO_The-Poisonous-Pearl.pdf
BIO-RAD, “Bulletin 5443: Biolistic Delivery Systems (sales brochure),” 2017.
Purest Colloids, “Testimonials for Mesogold®,” 2017.
Delia Derbyshire, “Dreams: Sea (edited field recordings)”, 1964.