Art project references: P'eng's Journey to the Southern Darkness, Ting-Tong Chang, 2016



In P’eng’s Journey to the Southern Darkness four kinetic sculptures of crows on elevated plinths and a collection of taxidermy birds, with internal computer circuits in their stomachs exposed, together announce failures of the artist by pronouncing rejection letters from numerous open calls to which he has applied. The number and the type of bird signify death in Chinese traditions and Chang playfully questions the proliferating bureaucratic art world in which contemporary artists find themselves.
The birds are surrounded by film documentation of various representative performances; for each piece, the artist collaborated with scientists and engineers to create a self-sustaining ecology within which Ting-Tong Chang integrated himself by living on nothing else but fish [Whence Do You Know the Happiness of Fish? (2015)] and caterpillars [Spodoptera Litura (2015)], or provided his own blood to feed mosquitoes [Second Life: Habitat (2016)] and the dead ones turn into avatars in an adjacent computer to be played by exhibition visitors.


Artist Ting-Tong Chang has vimeo profile, published an interview with Simon Schaffer where they also talk about instalation and about cultural perception of automata.



Citation from vimeo site - Simon Schaffer: One of the things that I think is very striking about the Orientalism of automata in European culture is for a very long time. For Europeans it was the East that was the land of the automatons, for three reasons. One is that the easterners peculiarly love automata. Secondly, there was a kind of paranoid conspiracy theory Europeans often have which is that Easterners want make everybody else into robots. And thirdly there is the European idea that Easterners are fatalists, that they don’t have a very strong idea of individualism or freedom. So for those three reasons, they like automata, they want to make us automata, and that they basically are automata. There’s always been that Eastern theme, in this kind of design and construction, and this is also absolutely what’s at stake here.
We are at a moment now where the whole politics of mobility, migration, labour and skill is right at the top of the agenda. Partly because of racism, partly because of xenophobia, partly because of bad and good reactions to certain kinds of globalisation. It seems to me a lot of that is going on in your work, especially in this set of installations and I think that animatronics is a very interesting way of thinking through and showing some of what’s at stake there, precisely because of, precisely concealment, invisibility and amnesia. What the new information technology revolution means is a much greener, less exploitative environment.
This is, of course, rubbish. And one way in which it is obviously rubbish and yet, hides the fact that it is, is by systematically drawing our attention away from the production of the commodities on which objects like this depend. So all the rare earths inside the circuits that drive the crow are invisible to us, just like all the assembly lines, which make all the machinery on which we depend.


Artist presents kinetic bird also in installation From Monday to Sunday in which taxidermytazed pigeon in controlled through Arduino circuit board (http://www.tingtongchang.co.uk/__/Monday.html)


Ting-Tong Chang (1982, Taiwan) received his MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London where he currently lives and works. Chang creates large-scale installation works that look to analyze the relationship between science, technology, and society. Chang purposefully builds his installations to be like ‘machines’, which not only encourages audience participation but also truly reflects the motivations behind his works. 






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