By Cao Keyuan
On May Day 2018, a unique performance was held in Beijing's 798 Goethe-Institut. On the event poster, a young pink woman, with her limbs stretched out and her hair flowing, appeared to be about to break out of the screen and fly into the middle of our audience, with the title "The Legend of Avatar".
The word “Avatar” is a household name among today's online game players and is the player's in-game incarnation. But it was the science fiction film Avatar, created by American director James Cameron, that made Avatar famous around the world. The Avatar-themed HBO sci-fi TV series “Westworld” has made Avatars an ongoing topic of conversation. In “Westworld” they, in turn, are coded artificially intelligent beings that serve the human experience beyond everyday life in a coded virtual world. Less well known is the fact that avatars were first created in Hinduism as human or animal deities who descended to the mundane world with the mission of serving as human beings in their endeavour to realise the transcendental essence and ultimate reality of the universe - Brahma - in the form of a human being. Its mission is to serve as a mentor and guide to Brahma in the human endeavour to realise the transcendental essence and ultimate reality of the universe - Brahma.
At the opening of the event, two moderators, Cao Kefei (theatre director and screenwriter) and Gesine Danckwart (playwright and director), came up to inform the audience that they would be following Avatar on a real-time tour of 798 through a screen, and that by connecting to WeChat, the audience as well as netizens would be able to watch it online and send it commands to do as it is told. This means that Avatar is not a spiritual mentor who descends from the sky. The mentor only gives instructions to humans, not the other way round.
The screen cuts to the outdoors, where we first see Avatar's feet and hear it greet us, but we can't see what it looks like because the camera is mounted on its head, and we're travelling through 798 from its point of view; it looks like it's just been parachuted into the building, because the first thing it says after greeting us is, "Where am I? What am I doing here?" It's confused, at a loss, circling in place. It was waiting to be told what to do, waiting for instructions. Sure enough, it's given a map of 798. It will follow the route on the map to different places and eventually get to 798 Goethe-Institute and deliver a letter. It also gets a handful of banknotes, because money is like air on this planet, and it cannot live without it. Avatar is instantly active, as if it has been given oxygen and energy. Avatar sets off on the road, making its first stop to visit the home of an old 798 worker. At the same time, the audience begins to give it instructions.
For more than two hours, we went into the worker's home and listened to him tell the story of 798's predecessor --- the 718 Factory; we followed the former factory producer to a fashionable art shop: back then, it was a factory where men and women shared bathrooms; we listened to the 798 artists recounting the difficulties in the early days of the creation of the art district; the space of the senior gallery owner changed hands several times, and the brutal shopping malls that did not see any blood under the skin of arts and culture; and we saw Avatar in more detail. We see more of Avatar walking around under the bombardment of netizens' instructions, greeting and amusing passing tourists. Historical stories and instantaneous happenings are like the oscillating ends of a pendulum, and we are placed in the middle of it, as historical images and instantaneous landscapes overlap and mix in our brains. Memory tries to resist time so that the past can be heard, while the immediate is running forward in time to throw off the past.
The 798 Art Zone is similar to the landscape of "cultural and creative industrial parks" that proliferate in China, where old abandoned factory buildings from the era of economic planning, tourists, fashionable men and women, and shops seem to be carved from a template and repeated indefinitely to feed people's retinas, tongues, and intestines, and after which the remainder of the scene is boredom and emptiness, waiting for the next big meal or dessert. We fall into the repetitive banality and boredom as Avatar is instructed by the netizens to "hug a handsome guy", "hug a pretty girl", "buy an ice-cream", etc. Between the colour of the panties under the skirt of a beautiful woman and the history of 798, netizens are more interested in the former.
The work's setting of the relationship between this avatar and us, the viewers, is a combination of online game and “Westworld” avatar types. We perceive the world through the screen in its perspective and at the same time participate in the world through our commands. Avatar is an extension of our senses in the world of the screen, while our bodies are always in the four-walled Goethe-Institute space. The screen is our contemporary world, except for sleep, we are always in the world of mobile phone screens, computer screens, TV screens, film screens, the body in the real world has been emptied, and the soul is travelling in the "faraway place" of the screen. The "virtual world" in the screen is our reality, and the physical reality is reduced to a socket to enter the "virtual world". As we walk between the towering glass buildings of sparsely populated Beijing, there are occasional people travelling between them. Their faces are pasted together with the mobile screen, with no sense of where their bodies are, like empty shells travelling through the city, crossing over, unaware of each other, the city has become a ghost town of hollow people.
The intention of the two authors is obviously to invite us to experience the real version of 798's "virtual world", through the depth of the surface, the excavation of history, and the instant encounter between Avatar and the people to present a more realistic 798, but we are more attracted by the homogenized surface of the "virtual world" of 798. However, we are more annihilated by this 798 "virtual world", by the homogenized landscape on the surface, and gradually swallowed up by a kind of boredom. Can a netizen in Berlin experience the "distant and poetic" world thousands of kilometers away? In any case, this is our reality: a constant dose of novelty and excitement to counteract boredom. This is why "virtual worlds" made of data and programming codes are becoming more and more perfect and realistic, surpassing and replacing the real world of our bodies. The human body is increasingly emptied of sensors, the brain becomes an information storage chip and an object of code, and the perception of the world is reduced to a volume of data and code algorithms. In the world of algorithms and data, people, life and death are dissolved, and data and algorithms can fit into any physical shell. People are indistinguishable from machines and numbers and are interchangeable with each other. Once again, people fall into a spiritual black hole of nothingness, absurdity, and anti-meaning.
At the end, Avatar arrives at the Goethe-Institute audience as initially instructed and hands over the letter in its hand to a live audience member. "She opens her eyes wide, her mouth wide, her wings wide. She faces towards the past, the things are manifesting, like broken tiles piled one on top of the other ...... A storm blows in her face, blowing her windswept wings towards the back of her body, and she falls backwards ...... Where does her gaze face?" This is precisely the fate of 798 Avatar. It was commissioned to lead the audience through the history of 798, only to be engulfed by the boring pop-ups of netizens. It came with a will to enlighten people, and was crushed instead.
This alludes to another scene at the back of the audience during the entire broadcast. A woman in a colourful costume was on a wall with a brush that read, "She's taking a break from what she's gazing at!" This act creates a kind of counterpoint to the live broadcast directly in front of her, warning of danger to the world that keeps running through the screen - danger, don't leave things! This is the opposite of "upping the stimulus dose" to fight boredom: gazing at things. Gazing at things is a way of withdrawing from time, of throwing ourselves completely into discovery, of discovering the fossils buried by time, the silences covered by the landscape, and of resisting the emptiness created by the passage of time over things. The more we gaze into things, the more vast we see, as in Blake's poem:
To glimpse the world in a grain of sand
See heaven in a wildflower.
At the end of the show, the presenter asked Avatar what it wished for, to which it replied, "I want to play the guitar!" It picks up a guitar and sings the "Avatar Song". Being manipulated by humans and serving them, Avatar has memory and computing power, but it cannot have wishes because it only carries out and waits for their instructions, and it is the best slave of humans: efficient, no breaks, no wages, no strikes. And wishing is one of the human attributes: self-awareness and the desire for freedom. Is this unexpected wish of 798s Avatar the result of the code algorithm in its body figuring out that self-awareness and freedom are the optimal choices for it, after it has gone through its robotic career? Is it possible that, like in the TV series “Westworld”, Avatars have gradually gained self-awareness and awakened to their desire to become human beings? This leads us to an extremely paradoxical picture: while the human being is running towards the "virtual world", becoming a virtual species and disappearing into the coded virtual world, the virtual species in the virtual world made of codes and wires is trying to become a human being. Is it possible that the ultimate end of the world of codes and algorithms is precisely the human being? Then why give up human attributes before reacquiring them? Is this the Creator's will, or to use the now popular term, the Creator's super-algorithm?
The two authors are long-time theatre directors and playwrights. In this work, they have abandoned almost all the techniques of conventional theatre, and have taken the daily life of the city as the scene, using a new theatre method of live art, audience participation and live broadcasting, to take us, the audience, to experience a real version of the "virtual world", and to bring us directly into the reality of the problems we are in. Even though some people were not used to the production, and there were a lot of malfunctions in the performance that affected the effect, as serious audience, we could not avoid the problems it brought up in today's world. Although in this work we feel that we oscillate between the two ends of the scale of nothingness and resistance to it, even tilting towards it at times, the author's very expansion of the theatre art form has stood at the life end of the scale. Art is essentially life-affirming, and it resists the nothingness of technological determinism with its intrinsic order and power.
