` ❥~ TIANRAN QIAN ✶.✩
Research-based creative practioner, strategist, producer, and digital talent agent.
Exploring how to hack for space in this alien aesthetic machine.
Currenty based in New York
Research interests:
computational aesthetics, text-image transmediality, word concept relations, epistimology knowledge representation, print to electronic texuality, digital image, human-AI collaboration in art, Chinese calligraphy, comparative approaches...
tianran.space@gmail.com
@_tianran_
👀
Self-Publication ❥ Enter The Bad Object ;⁍⦦⦧⦚
DOC 234—34/2
...in production...
Enter The Bad Object
Self-Publication Project
Poster by Sirui Liao
The project is still in the making.
The writing and production are also ongoing.
Updating how I’m thinking about it here.
Enter The Bad Object is an ongoing art self-publication project that documents the currently active space-making practices of the Chinese community in New York City through self-organizations. It comprises a series of interviews with the founders of these projects or organizations, exploring their concepts, motives, and journeys regarding how and why they chose to create space, and how content independence is achieved through financial sustainabilit.
The methodology is process-driven, highlighting the context of the research process itself and the continually transforming nature of these participating projects. It began with keywords like “Chinese" and “space,” not to territorialize or fixate a narrative with seemingly universal concepts as heterogeneous onto-epistemologies, but to share the complexities and fragilities behind them through textual and visual storytelling.
The publication will be in a folder format, featuring each organization in a pamphlet that can be added, removed, or rearranged, granting more agency to the audience. Both graphic and product design will serve as infrastructural structures that embrace changes along the process, rather than aestheticizing an archival tomb. Thus, this project also makes space for the spaces involved, aiming to foster potential connections and collaborations such as public programs and events.
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New York City
Urban spaces are comprised of a continuous flux of urban processes, which consist of networks of infrastructures that serve as mediators between nature, culture, and the creation of the city itself. Our everyday lives are heavily mediated by this dynamic network of infrastructures, as they arrange the premises of our actions.
New York City is famous for its gridiron layout system. It was a part of the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, renowned for its efficiency as it aimed to organize the city’s chaotic and rapidly expanding urban landscape. Yet, its spatial efficiency is heavily criticized for its orientation on capitalist growth, as every inch of the land is designed to be measured and extracted to its fullest potential in productivity. Lewis Mumford describes the city as an assemblage of media forms, a fundamentally communicative space that is also a large and complex epistemological and bureaucratic apparatus. Lauren Berlant defines infrastructures as “the movement or patterning of social form,” which outlines the underlying structures that are the “convergence of force and value in patterns of movement that’s only solid when seen from a distance” (Berlant 394). Brian Larkin also emphasizes the politics and poetics of infrastructure, highlighting the importance of viewing it as both technical functioning and semiotic vehicles, which produce both the patterns of forces and values determining the human heritage passed on.
Through an infrastructural lens from a distance, we are able to further decipher not only the political rationality or “apparatus of governmentality” that underlies these technical projects, but also the semiotic objects that determine how they address and constitute subjects (Larkin 330). We can more easily identify and approach a deeper understanding of our everyday urban life in this digital era of information capitalism, racial capitalism (McKittrick), vectoralism (Wark), data logical turn (Scannell), or however scholars are trying to define and pinpoint.
The Digital Everyday
The digital landscape of today reveals a complex web of relationships deeply embedded in today’s media landscape. Digital technologies are not isolated systems but are intertwined with the fabric of our cities. Graham observes that information technologies have become cornerstone infrastructures in our increasingly information-rich societies, echoing Manuel Castells' insights on The Rise of The Network Society. The spatial limitations of traditional physical spatial networks, like roads that both facilitate and confine movement, have given way to open digital networks.
Heidegger's critique of technology is especially relevant today, where computation has become integral to our physical and social infrastructure. He argues that modern technology reduces human relationships to the world into quantifiable entities, making it easy to exploit everything as a resource. Yuk Hui emphasizes the urgency of reflecting on our practices to avoid imposing Western technological thought as a universal standard, leading to subtle forms of colonialism. The global reach of technology, as Hui states, diminishes locality and makes the disorientation of the modern digital world even more pronounced.
Byung-Chul Han further emphasizes the shift in power dynamics from biopolitics to psychopolitics, where power is exercised in a more subtle and invisible manner as surveillance occurs via data. The more data we generate and the more intensively we communicate, the more visible we become and the more efficient surveillance becomes. Power thus becomes invisible while imposing permanent visibility on its subjects, who from an internal need desire to be visible (Han).
Databases act as topological machines, as described by Fuller and Goffey in their essay Digital Infrastructures and the Machinery of Topological Abstraction. They emphasize that databases operate beyond mere representation, functioning as topological machines that shape connections between entities, thus generating continuities in the data landscape. These continuities lead to the creation of networks of relationships among data points and their triggers. A primary issue with digital infrastructure lies in the synthetic generation of these data relationships, often restricting access to the network while favoring those with a privileged gaze. This setup establishes normalized connections as a hierarchy, guiding data flow in a unidirectional manner. Databases impose a statistical proximity, sometimes leading to conflicting qualities and systematic ambiguity due to the inherent discrepancies between statistical abstraction and real-world complexities. The strategic application of topological abstraction allows data systems to cross scales, impacting how information is interpreted and influencing the broader socio-political landscape.
Responding to these challenges requires a critical examination of how digital infrastructure operates and influences our understanding of reality, encouraging a strategic awareness of how data topology can shape or obscure knowledge, which is why digital media is often framed in epistemic terms, focusing on knowledge representation and modeling (Fuller and Goffey). This framing can overshadow the material and practical impacts of digital technology, which shape fields of experience and influence the ways in which digital infrastructures affect society. Digital technologies provide a framework for how knowledge is collected, stored, and interpreted, thus influencing how power operates in a digital society.
To address these challenges, it's essential to critically engage with digital infrastructure and reflect on the implications of these technological frameworks. By doing so, we could re-establish our sense of locality in a world increasingly dominated by planetary control of computational technology. "How we face the increasing alienation of our everyday life," as Lefebvre puts it, becomes an essential question.
Chinese In New York
It's unavoidable to consider how computational technologies, particularly algorithms and artificial intelligence, have become integral to our daily lives. It's increasingly important to understand how we position our bodies in the production circuits of space. Some technologies have become stable features in our landscape, significantly shaping actions and changes, as emphasized by scholars like Susan Leigh Star. From an economic perspective, individuals who align with the power in this stabilization process gain advantages by setting standards. Consequently, people adopt standardized technologies to leverage established infrastructures and capitalize on network externalities.
The public stability of a standardized network often translates into hardship for those who do not conform. These individuals must use the standard network without being members of the relevant community, especially in New York City. The city makes it challenging for those outside the standards to find a foothold, disconnected from the established control networks that exclude subjectivity. Star emphasizes the importance of discussing how individuals participate in communities, noting that "once arrangements become standard in a community, creating alternative standards may be expensive or impossible, unless an alternative community develops for some reason" (Star 92).
COVID-19 catalyzed a rise in independent organizations in the last few years. The Chinese community in New York has creatively navigated digital networks while maintaining its identity. Through collaborative efforts emphasizing shared backgrounds and unique relationships with the concept of identity, the community showcases how individuality and collective identity can coexist despite digital challenges. The stories of these organizers reveal the inventive creativity of these individuals, showing why they organized as they did.
Deleuze argues that the truly creative, which is conditioned in complex involution, enables entities to evolve and progress (Pearson 126). The body comes first, containing fluxes of being and producing in a continuum not constrained by language. This continuum is closer to the individual's story, highlighting complexities of their personal contingency. Data attempts to make the continuum countable, trying to control potentiality by making it calculable and measurable. People are subsumed into statistical populations, transformed into data that can be acknowledged in pre-existing frameworks they helped build. Affect, different from human subjectivity, is what gets measured and functions independently of the human subject. In rethinking labor, it's not humans who labor, but instead, capacities are measured to replace individual bodies. Affect, present in all matter, is the basis of measurement and determines how population biases are built on available technologies. Measurement is what sparks and moves through these relationships, generating specific processes. Individual stories also blend into the categories of populations, and to simplify matters, we categorize individuals with labels to make them easier to process.
Datafication has fundamentally altered traditional micro-macro relationships, rendering classical categorizations less relevant. In today's digital networks, populations exist as self-referential entities and interconnected parts of broader networks. This shift reflects the datalogical turn, where complexity is increasingly viewed through human measurement. Statistical analysis erases distinctions between micro and macro levels, pushing understanding toward measurable, data-driven insights.
This leads us to Judith Butler's theory of performativity, as Feng Chen illustrates in her essay "Performing Race and Remaking Identity." According to Butler, identity is performative, shaped by language and signifying acts, and must be analyzed through lenses acknowledging racial, gender, and sexual categories that articulate and reproduce institutional power. Butler identifies the need to use identity politics-based articulations of race to counter institutions that created race (Mecenas 2008). Race is performative, with no biological basis; it's a concept produced through language to serve institutional racism. As Stuart Hall suggests, "cultural identity is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture [...] It is not once-and-for-all" (1990: 226). In this sense, racial identity is an ongoing process of articulation and interpretation rather than a static concept (Chen 222).
Using Deleuze's philosophy, we rethink identity not as a signifying act from an apparatus of control mediated by data, but by focusing on the internal motivations of individuals within their context. This approach creates space for readers to understand these stories and their implications in a digital world increasingly dominated by data-driven standards. We aim to go beyond a single concept of Chinese identity, as Hecht argues for an African Anthropocene. “I do not aim to identify the characteristics of an ‘African’ Anthropocene in clear distinction to an ‘Asian’ or a ‘European’ one. Rather, I seek a means of holding the planet and a place on the planet on the same analytic plane (Hecht 112).”
This project employs “Chinese” as an analytic plane of departure, yet seeks to open the conversation by including individual stories from a Chinese community. Its experimentation with storytelling aims to capture and highlight how concepts are always in flux.
Organizational Assemblages
The ongoing process of datafication has fundamentally altered the traditional micro-macro relationship, making classical categorizations increasingly obsolete. Within the digital network landscape, populations exist both as self-referential entities and interconnected components of a larger system. This shift exemplifies the datalogical turn (Scannell), where complexity is understood through human measurement capabilities. As a result, the lines between micro and macro perspectives have blurred, with statistical analysis now erasing distinctions between the two levels. Entities in the digital sphere are no longer isolated but function as components of data-driven ecosystems with measurable effects. This shift redirects understanding from metaphysical speculation to measurable outcomes and data-driven insights.
This project seeks to document how the Chinese community in New York employs various organizational practices to conduct space-making, emphasizing the complexities and ever-changing nature of these practices rather than defining them. Assemblage theory, interpreted by Manuel DeLanda from Deleuze and Guattari, serves as the framework. Assemblages, according to Deleuze and Guattari, are "multiplicities made up of many heterogeneous terms that establish liaisons across ages, sexes, and reigns – different natures" (DeLanda). Entities are both parts and wholes, with parts interacting to form new assemblage wholes through relationships that link them.
Assemblages are unique historical entities, singular in their individuality, rather than members of a general category. As DeLanda asserts, "All assemblages are unique historical entities, singular in their individuality, not as particular members of a general category. But if this is so, then we should be able to specify the individuation process that gave birth to them." Starting with terms like "space-making practices" and "Chinese," this project initiates discussion while examining the interiority of organizations and the project itself. This approach prevents a static archival tomb of defined identities and captures the dynamic cultural ecology of creative New York.
Categories can be understood as assemblages, with opposite concepts transitioning into one another. DeLanda proposes a modified version of assemblage theory with adjustable parameters, including a coding parameter and a territorialization parameter that measure the degree of homogenization and the extent to which boundaries are delineated. This project also aims to open possibilities for deterritorialization and change while understanding where coding or territorialization occurs to "do justice to the complexity of the historical record."
DeLanda's concept of the assemblage diagram captures the structure of possibility space associated with assemblages. Assemblages possess properties that their parts do not, providing tendencies and capacities that are real but not necessarily actualized. The diagram captures this virtuality, connecting "an assemblage with other diagrams, and with a cosmic space in which diagrams exist free from the constraints of actuality" (DeLanda 5). This project will use diagrams to map our process, documenting the actualized while leaving space for the virtual and potential. Interactions within the community have catalyzed collaborations, shaping the project's direction.
We propose a nonlinear, process-driven methodology that comprehends the interplay of causes and motivations underlying social assemblages. Assemblage theory offers a unique approach to bridging the micro-macro gap by emphasizing the repetition of assembly processes (territorialization and coding) across scales. In the wake of COVID-19, "alternative communities" have been established by the Chinese community in New York through self-organization. These unique organizations create "alternative standards" that defy categorization, demonstrating immense imagination and action beyond standardized norms.
Anarchive The Bad Objects
The title of this project draws from Emmy Mikelson’s reference to Anthony Vidler, who describes space as “a bad object.” Vidler emphasizes the "abilities of space itself to dissolve boundaries, as it is transgressive by nature, breaking the boundaries of all conventions, social or physical… a bad object - abject and ignoble in its ubiquity, endlessly invading the protected realms of society and civilization with the disruptive forces of nature” (Mikelson.) Space as a medium possesses the possibility of dissolving meanings of general categories that are usually highly stereotyped based on socially constructed standards of exclusion. In this way, all of the organizations are making space, and thus are bad objects, that cannot be subjected to a single definition.
As Mikelson outlines in her article, these exclusive meanings derive from a traditional Western-centric vertical ontology, which is based on hierarchical relationships between the subject and object, and distinctions between entities in a single, fixed, and hierarchical structure. Rethinking ontology is spatial. It is a challenge that could deterritorialize and reterritorialize our understandings of epistemology itself, as scholars like Manuel DeLanda proposed a new model of flat ontology which is “one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status” (Mickelson 13). This spatial analogy describes a dense and complex "field of both interaction and isolation, where things (read as human and nonhuman) are at moments drawn in relation to one another, and at moments withdrawn and discrete."
The involuted creativity of these organizations renders them categorically undefinable, making them problematic or "bad objects" under the traditional paradigm of the object-subject relationship, which often empowers the observing subject. Therefore, although this is a documentary project about our contemporaneity, it does not adhere to a traditional archival method; instead, it adopts an anarchival approach.
An anarchive is a concept not standardized in scholarly or popular use; it generally refers to a non-traditional, anti-authoritarian approach to archives or collections of historical and cultural materials. As a noun, anarchive indicates that which slips beyond, rejects, or cannot be archived (Derrida 1994). For Derrida, anarchive meant slipping away from, rejecting, or exceeding the archival process. Derrida describes something as anarchiving itself right at the point of archiving; he views absence as constituting the archive (Derrida 57; McCall 4). Similar to Massumi’s view suggested by McCall, I view anarchiving also as a creative technique, a feedforward mechanism using archival traces as a springboard to describe a form of practice that resists conventional methods of categorization, preservation, and control typically associated with traditional archives.
Methodology Is A Theoretical Question
“Because the basic object of infrastructure is so diverse and can be analyzed in so many different ways, the choice of methodology is a theoretical question (Larkin, 338).” The content itself, which are stories told through interviews, span a wide spectrum of topics, encompassing cultural production, community dynamics, business models, collaborative approaches, identity politics, migration, cultural policies, creative urban ecology, gentrification, and the unique context of New York, among others. I wonder about the effectiveness of analyzing or theorizing about this group of individuals and their practices, especially given the unique challenges they faced during the fluctuating conditions of the Covid-19 years, which included frequent changes in cultural, immigration, and housing policies. These space-making practices themselves are also creative and proactive from various motives and reasonings, making them categorically independent in the first place. There is also no existing theoretical frameworks to understand post-Covid times as digital infrastructures and political boundaries are constantly changing. The first step is to establish an anarchival infrastructural design system, which means to approaching matters from new perspectives in order to uncover unprecedented relationships between them. Perhaps the greater intrigue lies in viewing this compilation as a rich cultural object, worthy of reflection at a later time. Consequently, the project’s methodological inquiry predominantly centers on the documentation itself.
How to document the complexities of our contemporary life? How can we position ourselves as storytellers and illustrate our perspective through various mediums to contextualize our own process? How can we design an infrastructural system that embraces change rather than excluding it? In what ways can this project serve as a generative space for participating organizations, the audience, and ourselves? How could it gain agency and mobility through various ways of distribution?
As Anna Tsing argues, "Cultures are continually co-produced in the interactions I call 'friction': the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference" (Tsing). In a world where historical texts are inherently subjective, the question becomes: how do we authentically narrate contemporary stories? Our goal is to create a cultural object that embodies "the terms of transition that alter the harder and softer, tighter and looser infrastructures of sociality itself" through personal narratives. This project comprises two interconnected layers: the story of the organizer and our encounters with them, reflecting the organic development of the project.
Understanding the context our data-logical world is crucial. We must consider the life cycle of urban information and its interaction with various urban sites and subjects. This requires a comprehensive view of data's human, institutional, and technological creators, its curators, cleaners, and preservers, as well as its brokers, "users," hackers, and critics (Mattern, 64). For this task, demystification should be employed cautiously, as it assumes that human agency underlies every event or process, illicitly attributing power to things.
Instead of advocating for a specific framework with evidence and case studies, our objective is to expand the discussion to encompass the nuances and complexities inherent in the keywords that shaped this project, such as “Chinese”, “space-making”, “organization” and “independence”. We aim to present a process-driven framework for our concept and methodology by synthesizing textual, visual, and material narratives, enhancing the context of our documentation. This approach captures the project's journey and offers the audience insights into the path that led to the current outputs, including a paper-based publication, a website, and a month-long series of public programs and events.
The publication consists of a collection of interviews, that will include information such as time, location, and participants to trace the evolution of personal relationships, directly and clearly illustrating the context of our conversations. Some interviews were conducted by others at public events, and we will provide appropriate context and acknowledgment for diverse perspectives.
Recognizing that identity frameworks often reflect Western-centric epistemological biases in their stereotypical definitions, our goal is to use this process to uncover the complexities embedded in language rather than relying on examples to reinforce hierarchical ontological models. Adopting an assemblage approach, we document the contingencies that arise from interactions between individuals and organizations, mutually shaping each other. This approach preserves and shares a degree of locality, as the locus of control has become porous and global, often resulting in the erosion of site-specificity.
On Neutrality
I aimed to approach this topic from a relatively neutral standpoint, emphasizing that being neutral does not equate to being non-critical. Roland Barthes elucidates this concept of neutrality in his 1977-78 lecture courses, defining the Neutral as "that which outplays {déjoue} the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm…My Neutral — can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states. 'To outplay the paradigm' is an ardent, burning activity" (Barthes, 7).
For Barthes, neutrality is a "third term" that does not align with either end of a binary but exists independently, embodying an amorphous and undefinable space—a bad object. He extends this concept beyond linguistics to ethics and everyday life, describing it as a refusal to engage in the compulsive conflicts of cultural, social, and personal paradigms. This represents a profound form of freedom from normative pressures.
Understanding the organization's content independence through Barthes' concept of neutrality suggests sustaining themselves philosophically to avoid the violence of dogmatic assertions and to live within and make space for such ambiguity and undecidability. Jane Bennet refers to this in her discussion of Vibrant Matter, suggesting that "the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one's response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating" (Bennet, 37).
In line with this, our project emphasizes creating a space for neutrality by prioritizing anarchiving over rushing towards analysis and conclusions, which often relies on a Western epistemological framework. This choice has an ethical dimension, aiming to respect plurality and avoid imposing our will or beliefs on others, rather than asserting authoritative expertise to define a stance within the existing paradigm. This approach calls for a deeper understanding of the complexities in our discourse, particularly in today’s technolinguistic landscape characterized by increasing homogeneity. The focus returns to the intentions of individual people, including ourselves as creators of this project. As Berlant notes, “once again, human intentionality is positioned as the most important of all agential factors, the bearer of an exceptional kind of power” (Berlant 34). Perhaps, by working collectively and collaboratively, we can imagine and act to “outsmart mastery” (Barthes 10), thereby creating a space of disorientation within the current apparatus.
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Work Cited
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Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press, 2010.
Berlant, Lauren. "The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 393-419.
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DeLanda, Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
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