MONOCULTURE | Een recent verhaal

Title: Eurasia Networks: An Ecology of Practices in Common

In her talk, Mi You will take a deep dive into Eurasia and trace various forms of premodern global – trade, informational, mythical – networks, and their implications for understanding monoculturalism today. The examples range from Nam June Paik’s vision of Eurasian Information Highway and his dialogues with Joseph Beuys, well documented in art history, to lesser known modernist paintings depicting indigenous land-ocean connections, from much touted and romanticised trade routes to old belief and practice systems such as the interconnected realms in shamanism and astrology. The networks are not just distributed across a wide stretch of the Eurasian continent, but at times point to cosmological dimensions and can thus be viewed as instances of ‘cosmotechnics’, borrowing the terminology of Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui. What is the relevance of unearthing these networks today? Not satisfied with pinpointing ‘what had already been there’, Mi You will focus on ways of deriving critical lenses and operational models from the past to insert into contemporary society. Central to her project of renewing Eurasia is the quest for a relational network encompassing nature as much as the social realm. This ecology of practices in common can be manifested in artistic, speculative as well as social practices.

Bio: Mi You is a lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and Aalto University, Helsinki. Her long-term research and curatorial projects spin between the two extremes of the ancient and futuristic. She works with the Silk Road as a figuration for nomadic imageries and old and new networks/technologies. She has curated programmes at Asian Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016), and with Binna Choi, she is co-steering a research/curatorial project ‘Unmapping Eurasia’. At the same time, her interests in politics around technology and futures led her to work on “actionable speculations”, articulated in the exhibition, workshops and sci-fia-thon Sci-(no)-fi at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (2019), as well as in her function as chair of the committee on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational political NGO Common Action Forum.