🔧THE REFUSAL ROOM 🔧
𝘼 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙨𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙣 𝙗𝙧𝙤𝙠𝙚𝙣 𝙢𝙖𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨, 𝙛𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙨𝙩 𝙩𝙚𝙘𝙝𝙣𝙤-𝙡𝙤𝙜𝙞𝙘𝙨, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙬𝙚𝙡𝙡.
每天我們請 Siri、Gemini 或 Google Assistant 播放歌曲、點晚餐、提供資訊。毫不費力、隱形無痕。但如果這份順暢，其實是建立在性別化勞動與父權幻想的隱形架構之上呢？
這個閱讀環節以Sarah Sharma的兩篇文本為起點：”Manifesto for the Broken Machine” and “Going to Work in Mommy’s Basement”帶動關於科技女性主義媒體理論（techno-feminist media theory）與拒絕的技術邏輯（techno-logics of refusal）的討論。
我們聚在一起不是為了講書，而是分享經驗與觀察如「母職指令」的語音助理、將Mommy’s Basement延伸至數位時代的零工應用程式如 Uber 與 Keeta，以及讓男性幼兒化、同時讓女性化照護隱形的”coder caves”
參加者將重新理解科技與女性的關係；不是一份要求被納入的訴求，而是對父權機器的激進拒絕。故障機器並非故障，它是一種策略、一個安全房間。亦是透過藝術介入、日常破壞與集體拒絕來讓系統卡住的方式。
五個keywords。一位嘉賓藝術家。歡迎故障的到來～
✨ Special Discussant: Linda Lai @lindafpc
🎤 Host: G&L @astrojoke_archive@hhyperrealistic
📅 May 18 | 7PM – 9PM
📍 Venue Support: 據點。句點 Floating Projects @floatingprojects L3-06D, Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre (JCCAC) 30 Pak Tin Street, Shek Kip Mei, Kowloon
九龍石硤尾白田街30號賽馬會創意藝術中心 L3-06D
💰 $65 per person
🔗 QR code/ dm @astrojoke_archive@hhyperrealistic / Link in bio to register
Oberhausen Seminar 2026 - my report 2.
Established in our first meeting: a renewal of language to generate new knowledge --
-- scaling in (micro narratives) and scaling out (macro-practices)
-- embedded in terms we use are conventions and likely restrictions (our encounter with grammatology) <-- to be responded by our experimental action (grammatization practices)
-- experimental action (historicizing avant-garde cinema and concepts of experimentation) --> artistic agencies --> organological sensibility
//Micro Narratives -- a case of experimental action... scaling in (anatomy of the moving image) & scaling out (plurality of images in circulation)
//Organology: 1/ medical analogy of connectivity (Simondon); 2/ technology as technics and formation of our temporal being and mnemonic practices (Stiegler); and 3/ the interplay and eclectic deployment hetero-sources of imaging within a single work challenging our critical and interpretive langauge.
*special thanks to @myoka_murmurs Masayo Kajimura (Selection Committee, International Competition) to join one of our sessions for a frank conversation.
Pics 01-10: the dynamics of the seminar enabled by 24 open-minded, experienced, informed and sensitive seminar fellows
Thanks @kurzfilmtage.oberhausen
for giving us the autonomy and facilitation to let our exchange happen.
Much indebted: @georgsimbeni@chi.jang.yin@tayloredelle@leonardo.severino_@rubysircar@msouzanna@hup.hub.berlin@miss_elainewong@viewfromk@rachelelizabethashton_@lamkinchoi@gemmariggsfilm@der_pixel@juliapolo_@leonardo.severino_@chi.jang.yin@msouzanna@oe_oceaneducation@____zachary@ceciliyazi@streetcornyuchi@sanaserkebaeva@lyfly_95 , Vedant Srinivas and Wenfei Zhou, and our group's young filmmaker friend Maryam @maryam_zuhuri
#oberhausenseminar #oberhausenseminar2026 #experimentalaction #lindachiuhanlai #lindalaiprojects
Oberhausen Seminar 2026 - my report 1.
It is not just a visit of a familiar short film event, but a measure of my growth and my changes. I found myself immersed in trust and openness, in a space of critical conversation with people who care about the world as much as the moving image and its future. The rejuvenation I have is yet to taste. Here, first, part 1, snippets of the broad narrative of this journey with many gaps to fill.
01 - waiting for the train at Frankfurt airport, feeding my anxiety with junk food I don't usually take.
02 - Up to this point, I have only studied their profiles and pics on the Oberhausen website. ...
03 - The seminar rooms where we spent our week were full of diagrams and maps. Indeed, our seminar is full of grammatological studies and grammatization attempts
04 - Festival poster featuring images from a work that split our views with cool discussions
05 - Now the faces in pics are real acquaintances and future collaborators -- the second last night before our departure.
06 - the forward-looking team, Susannah Pollheim and Madeleine Bernoff, Festival Directors
07 - Finally able to say good-bye to Madeleine on my way back to the hotel to pack up
08 - Great company, Elaine @miss_elainewong . We were sharing our thoughts of the seminar on the train before we separated to catch our own flights
09 - back in Hong Kong 7:30am
10 - some memorabilia ... including a "gold coin" from Kasia @k_smmmthings who wished us all would have the funds we need for our next project.
Thanks Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen @kurzfilmtage.oberhausen
#lindachiuhanlai #lindalaiprojects #oberhausenseminar #oberhausenseminar2026
"Mining the Datafied World: Beyond the Social Dystopic-Utopic Split View Through Art" -- an essay I wrote in response to @gjshin_art Gyung-jin Shin's solo show "The Unmined" (October 2025, Current Plans, Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong). The essay is now published in the show's proceedings, pp. 3-14. It is now also readable in 2 parts on the "Floating Teatime" session (see link in bio) of the official website of the Floating Projects @floatingprojects
Main points of my essay:
From suspected loss of humanness to the moderation of knowledge asymmetry in the AI milieu: haven't we always existed as data? What could artistic intervention do as a proactive engagement, especially in visualizing the materiality of data containers?
In the essay, I also attempt a genealogy of data as sculpture: archaeological precedents in ancient civilization and artistic carrier of data in contemporary society... also in reference to Shin's attempt for sculptural containers of data in her solo show, October 2025.
#lindachiuhanlai #lindalaiwritings #dataasart #datacontainers #newmediaart #lindalaiinterdisplinary
A new essay uploaded to Floating Teatime, a page I've struggled to sustain on the @floatingprojects website. Summer is coming, and the FP Book Fair is finished. It's time we started the long journey for our next possible book fair. Here's a piece, uploaded a day ago, that will be added to the growing FP Cinema Papers series:
Writer: Emilie Choi (Choi Sin-yi) @emiliesyyy
Title: "How to narrate and reenact the bodies of migrant workers? 如何敘述與重演移工的身體？"
On two action-based documentary videos by SO Yo-hen: (1) video title 作品名稱：（阮國非） / (Nguyễn Quốc Phi) / 2022 / 6'; (2) 工寮 / Gubuk or (Hut) / 2018 / 53'50"
**could be read on "Floating Teatime" on FP's website.
#fpcinemapapers #lindalaicollaboration #floatingprojects #fpresearchseries #fpresearch #migrantlabourers #taiwandocumentary #migrantworkers #participatoryart #reenactment
An exercise of rule-based improvisation on self-organization and collaborative individuation inspired by Mitchel Resnick's "decentralization mindset" in his book Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams... for participants at Next Move @unlockdancingplaza ... something with great potential for further development for performative arts.
I first tried out this exercise with the Floating Projects @floatingprojectscollective people as one episode of a 4-episode performance I produced, titled "Object-Subjectivities" 《重塑「東西遊戲」》in June 2016, Cattle Depot in Videotage's NO REFERENCE. The emphasis was also on bottom-up intelligence and the room for individual expression within a framework of collective action.
#lindachiuhanlai #floatingprojects #lindalaicollaboration #unlockdancingplaza不加鎖舞踊館
Joyfully completed my workshop for Next Dance at @unlockdancingplaza
I drew from three research-artistic sources to assemble three rule-based creativity events to exchange with artists in dance:
(1) from experimental videography: fragments and whole, alternative ways to think of unit-to-unit transition; (2) from computational thinking: self-organization for rule-based generative creation without a central commander; and (3) from creative writing: surrealist world-making rooted in concrete mental images and everyday impressions
A few keywords coming out of the 3-round workshop: (the concept of) emergence, self-organization, complexity, cellular automata and Game of Life as an organic machine, collaborative individuation, self-dialogue, here and now, generative thinking
Trajectory: body as sculpture (muscles, joints, forms)--> body-to/and-body formation --> world-making
#lindachiuhanlai #transdisciplinaryart #lindalaicollaboration #creativeworkshop #unlockdance
The Kid, Bruce Lee: immediate post-WII HK society & local cinema’s pedagogic burden 《細路祥，街童李小龍：戰後香港社會和港產影話戲的道德包袱》｜ Linda C.H. Lai 黎肖嫻 | 99 pages, bi-lingual 雙語 based on first-hand newspaper ad research | Floating Projects Research Series | Floating Projects Monographs ***available now at Floating Projects.
延續有關香港「細路祥」的兩篇連載。2020-2021期間，黎肖嫻潛進環繞苦難中的孩子的沈甸甸而充滿矛盾的論述。
Cinema in history has never been pure entertainment even when the industry claims so. And never is power infiltration in cinema coercive: at the end of the pipe line a well told humanistic story is demanded, and it'd better touch people's mind and heart. From deliberate control through organizational agenda to well grossed entertainment through moral reasoning, cinema has the best illustration of social mechanism at work. It suggests we should move away from simplified accounts of power presence, at the same time pay attention to the fine fabrics of everyday life, of the way things hang together, without losing the broad view.
Around 2020-2021, amid suffocation, I felt the burden to articulate a response – and I did by drawing from HK’s cinema history. My sensibility landed on the horizon of kids and the meaning of education and its future.
Originally published as a series of 2 articles (now expanded to 3) on Floating Teatime, FPs’ writing platform, I revisited my research notes. My newspaper research pointed me immediately to the popular Shanghai-based saga of Three Hairs, which considered Cantonese oldie The Kid A-Chang as its HK counterpart. It was fueling quite a marketing battle to celebrate Children's Day, playing upon moralistic as well as patriotic sentiments among local audiences.
Is A-Chang a token of suffering? Is A-Chang who he is because of Bruce Lee’s highly acclaimed personification? Is A-Chang simply a counterpart of Three Hairs? Why do both cases of film adaptation drawn from comics, a specific form of literature (in war-time and the immediate post-war era) for people who could be illiterate?
#children #childreneducation #propagandaincinema #postww2hongkong #brucelee #pedagogicburden #moralburden #lindalaiwritings #lindalaifloatingprojects #monographs #floatingprojectszines
The Floating Book Fair celebrating Floating Projects' Year 11 will end with a long weekend of performance and object-play installation.
Please join our Open Door events.
Very happy to be given the chance to put intermedia and trans-disciplinary thinking into an experiment. Looking forward to learning something new from the choreographers and dancers I will meet this Saturday by sharing some "rules" from other art forms.
Bernard Stiegler wrote about "grammatization" as the formation of conventions that may lead to control or loss of understanding. I agree with him and also believe grammatization is the starting point of innovation, not only for dance but for any art species in questions.
Special thanks to Joseph Lee @josephwnlee and Unlock Dancing Plaza @unlockdancingstudio for trusting me.
#lindachiuhanlai #lindalaiexperiments
Hector Rodriguez @hectorlaspalmas on horror as contemporary fairy tale and Henry James @floatingprojects Year 11 Floating Book Fair.
The talk introduced how he got to complete the monograph "Ghosts: Atmospheres of Mystification" still available on view on-site at Floating Projects.
#hectorlaspalmas #hectorlaspalmasmonographs #fpresearchseries #FPmonographs #lindalaicollectibles
