Imminent Decisions: A Generative Lecture-Performance on Ecology and Time

Artist: Hu Rui

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs ... of human participation in nature.”

—Karl Marx

Hu Rui's lecture-performance is devised upon a science fiction setting that also serves as the backdrop for one of his recent works. Sci-fi proves to be a remarkably versatile container, for it can be simultaneously accurate, prophetic, political, emotional, non-doing (wu wei), and fabricated. It is within this premise that the artist asks for permission to establish the following setting and scenario: The climate crisis was deemed inevitable, yet its urgency seemed distant until a certain threshold year. After extensive research on radical geo-engineering projects guided by the principle that “what’s technical is also natural,” and facilitated by AI supercomputing simulation, the Urban Planning Committee of a coastal city convened a series of conferences.

Two competing options emerged from the committee: 1) Abandon protective measures against rising sea levels, and instead begin allowing sea water into the city and build floating communities on the new water territory; 2) Implement a comprehensive “rewilding” whereby plants and algae cover all ground surface including roads, streets, and architecture, allowing the vegetation coverage to return to its pre-industrial levels. Advocates of the two proposals engaged in a final discussion during the plenary meeting that followed.

This generative lecture-performance, developed and conducted in collaboration with artificial intelligence, revisits three narrative fragments stored within the participants’ brain-computer interfaces, revealing a psychic state that drifts between scientific decision-making and the internal stream of consciousness under the condition of crisis.

Solidarity with the Non-Human: How We Approach Ecology in the Anthropocene

Speaker: Hu Fangqi

We’ve already done it! The ecological issue is a hornet’s nest we stirred up long ago. But now, our naïveté threatens our own downfall: we still continue to act like the experts evaluating risks from a distance, all encased in masks and isolation gowns, striving to come up with solutions through accusation and finger-pointing. What must be grasped is that the world is never isolated beyond our protective gears; rather, we are with the hornets, trapped and sealed within the masks meant to shield us.

These hornets are the non-humans we assumed we had successfully quarantined. To approach ecology in the Anthropocene means removing the haughty protective gears of anthropocentrism, seeking a new mode of symbiosis, and rebuilding solidarity with the non-human multitudes we once regarded as mere targets of the united front. This new mode is destined to be ultimately spectral, quantum, and simultaneously ecological and artistic.

About the Artist: Hu Rui

Hu Rui works with video, installation, and computer simulation. His practice engages with issues related to time and temporality from a multitude of perspectives, such as causation, prediction, choice, and language. He is the recipient of the Best Experimental Animation Award at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival and a Jury Special Mention at the 25FPS Festival Croatia. His work has been shown in exhibitions and screenings at art spaces, institutions, festivals, and conferences, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; IFVA at the Hong Kong Arts Centre; Times Museum, Guangzhou; Three Shadows, Xiamen; Objetifs, Singapore; Start Museum, Shanghai; Wuhan Biennale; Siggraph Asia; ISEA, among others. He received an MFA in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BFA in Film and Television with a minor in Computer Science from New York University. He is currently Assistant Professor in Computation and Design at Duke Kunshan University.

About the Speaker: Hu Fangqi

Born in Changchun, Jilin Province, Hu Fangqi holds a BA in Chinese Literature from Xiamen University and M.A. in Literary Theory from Tongji University. He currently works as a freelance translator and writer while pursuing his PhD in Philosophy at Tongji University. His academic focus is on Western contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, with primary research centered on the non-anthropocentrism and ecological thoughts pioneered by Timothy Morton under the perspective of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO).