Sowing the Virtual: How Art Can Re-assemble the Urban Sphere in Guangzhou, China

Abstract

How can art sow a seed of change in the world we live? This thesis aims to contribute to the discussion from a spatial-temporal perspective and produce situated knowledge by zooming into the urbanist art practice in Guangzhou, China. Embarking on Israeli artist Omer Fast’s The Invisible Hand, a multimedia experience in 3DVR commissioned by Guangdong Times Museum in 2018, it thinks with an unfolding space-making project and explores how it creates circuits with Guangzhou’s urban transformation. It draws upon Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of virtuality, looking at Fast’s work as a crystal image and thus exploring art’s potential in re-assembling the urban sphere. Deleuze thinks of reality as the entwinement between the actual and the virtual, and time as the intrinsic property of space, the philosophy of which has been echoed in contemporary theories of cinema and architecture and arts and society at large. In the light of Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Arie Graafland and Deborah Hauptmann, and Donna Haraway, I present a performative analysis of The Invisible Hand’s configuration of the actual and virtual, in which the economic reform, urban expansion, pursuit of happiness, gentrification and identity reconstruction that take place in Guangzhou are weaved into the visitor’s experience of reality. In the same process, it asks for attention to media technologies and urban infrastructures, raising the urgency of approaching the urban through its multiplicities. In the examination of its coalescence with the urban sphere and its deconstructive and germinating potential, I consider that the work opens up a dialogue of identity, public space, and the role of art in the urban. In the end, I propose a reciprocal relationship between art and the city.