Reinaart, YAN Jun, WANG Zhen Fei/WANG Luming (HHD FUN), Michael YUEN (via Skype) and I meet up on a Sunday afternoon at the Contemporary MOMA building where HHD_FUN has just moved their offices.
Despite the technological ease to which we have become accustomed, it always seems that real space takes precedent, and the disjunctured worlds of Michael sitting by himself in a pub in Melbourne (shorts and sandals!) and our attempted conversation in a high-rise small-office-home-office overlooking the 2nd ring road doesn’t always connect. Michael can’t hear so well, people are in a different frame of mind, and oh… what was on the agenda?
But i suppose that these moments are “also spaces” as well. Without expectation that everything is communicated, things may fall into place. Yan Jun gives an impromptu joint-bending concert over a computer mic into Michael’s earbuds, and we can only guess whether or not he’s heard it by the changing details of his expression. HHD_FUN show simple prototypes of the elastic structures (you can buy many colours on Taobao, but they haven’t yet decided which one[s]) they’d like to build on another computer, a bit too far away for Michael to see at this point but we can see the still life of his dark ale going slowly down across the room, across the network.
Melbourne is only two hours ahead of Beijing, yet that longitudinal here and now is kilometres and kilometres away from the actual sentience of the here and now of our friend, in “this room”. We experience these things simultaneously, like a call centre worker faking an American accent to speak to someone in the suburbs of Los Angeles. “This five minutes” can be an age, an epoch, a blink. Our ways of understanding space and time have completely changed from the beginnings of industrialisation, of course. But I like the thought of a long now, in also space.
Reinaart leaves for Holland the next day. He may come back in March for a brief visit, but let us see how things continue to develop…
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