Jen Liu - July 2021
It's a means of critiquing failures of imagination about how to address pressing social problems, especially through contemporary art and film.
Above all, my motivation for using populist images, tangible props and costumes, and recognizable visual and musical modes, is to make things such as global economic infrastructures emotionally available, intimate.
My current body of work, Pink Slime Caesar Shift, builds on a speculative proposal to build a secret information network for labor activists in China through the domestic food distribution grid - through inserting covert messages into the DNA code of in-vitro beef hamburgers.
I take this proposal as seriously as possible: doing the lab work of inserting newly informative genetic code into beef cells, as well as building sealed, wearable carriers for their possible distribution in food production centers.
For when the speculative future arrives.
Work in other mediums spin out of those methods of genetic engineering.
But this is not just about China’s imperiled activists, meat as a cultural symbol, or new food technologies as solutions to environmental disaster.
This is also about the social-possibilities of re-appropriating technologies, whether it is the technologies of genetic engineering, or the technologies of narrativity.
If the hamburger patty is an industrially replicated object, and the in-vitro burger a banal sci fi concept - what “secret messages” can I stuff it with:
histories of covert political resistance
forgotten female programmers
secret languages
critique of technobabble
more?
Recombinatory approaches and mutation are overall themes.
In hybrid video-animations, industrial texts and corporate sales brochures are cut together with firsthand accounts of labor activists and factory workers:
Frankensteins that are the consequence of corporate abstractions
Genetically altered biological samples are embedded in jewelry editions
The speculative is brought down to earth, given a “real” future on “real” bodies
In choreography, industrial processes and their toxic costs are humanized
Beautiful and repulsive at the same time
In paintings, large feminine fingers push and prod the world around them
“Diagramming” the jingo and jango of global economics
See more of Jen’s work here.