藍天瑀
I am blue like the expanse of the sky, splicing the heavens, delineating the infinities that bound our material world
天
I am blue like the gleam of the stones, where we find the meatspace and long for the perversion of corporeal reality
瑀
The landscapes of the human skin is blue
The materiality of the flesh is blue
The transfiguration of the Real is blue
The ode to the Eternal Forms is blue
The infinite tends to the singular
The singularity tends to infinity
The weave and its asymptotic slink is blue
Dilation of the interlaced net, of the deep black pinhole of perception
Contraction of gridlined plane, of the murky darkness of yonic wavelengths
Blue consumes its tail.
Email Lamceline.ty@gmail.com
䷂屯: A self-taught traditional Chinese seal carver, DJ and tattoo practitioner with performance and writing forming the core of their work, Blue is concerned with returning to ancestral roots and cosmologies. Blue hopes to learn to care and heal through practice and honour traditions, past(s) and histories.
Curriculum Vitae
Education
(2021 - 2024)
Goldsmiths, University of London
BA (Hons) Fine Art and History of Art
First Class Honours
London, United Kingdom
(2019 - 2020)
Nanyang Technological University School of Art, Design and Media
BFA Media Art with Specialisation in Photography and Minor in Art History
Incomplete
Singapore, Singapore
Exhibitions
(13 - 17 June 2024)
Goldsmiths, University of London Undergraduate Fine Art Degree Show
Ben Pimlott Building, Level 3, Goldsmiths, University of London
London, United Kingdom
(9 - 10 May 2024)
Liminal Entities
Milbank Podium
Performance in collaboration with Nereus Hall
Supported by UAL’s Bounce Fund
London, United Kingdom
(8 June 2023)
Kunst Affair Vol. 2
AMP Studios
London, United Kingdom
(6 - 27 August 2022)
Thresholds of Being
starch
Curated by Sheryl Gwee, Xuan Yeo
Singapore, Singapore
Panels and Talks
(14 August 2024)
EXTRACORPOREALITY: BODIES AND THE URGE TO TRANSCEND
Pushkin House
Artist talk and panel regarding critial theory and art practice
Hosted by everyoneisagirl, discussion led by Noa Fischer, curated by Ester Freider
London, United Kingdom
Writing and Publications
(January 2025)
“玄之又玄,众妙之门。(Xuan and again xuan, gate to all mysteries.)” : Daoist Philosophy and Cosmotechnics as Gateway to Reconciling our Relationship to The Cyberspace
Edited Dissertation
Published by Xeno-Futurism
London, United Kingdom
(2024)
“玄之又玄,众妙之门。(Xuan and again xuan, gate to all mysteries.)” : Daoist Philosophy and Cosmotechnics as Gateway to Reconciling our Relationship to The Cyberspace
BA Dissertation
Distinction
Supervised by Dr. Alice Andrews
Goldsmiths, University of London
London, United Kingdom
(August 2024)
Lest it disappear from the world: The Scars of Singaporean Performance Art History and the Choreopolitical Rise of Singaporean Movement Art and Butoh in the 2020s
Visual Cultures/ Art History Essay and Research Project
Distinction
Goldsmiths, University of London
London, United Kingdom
(June 2024)
spaces as traces: A Devotion to Narratives between the Thresholds of Spirituality and Digitality
Review written for Shiyun Teo First Solo Exhibition, spaces as traces at Feelium Gallery, 14 - 17 June 2024
London, United Kingdom
Performances
(19 - 20 August 2023)
Livia Rita: Dystopian Wetlands
Southbank Centre
With Avantgardeners Community
Creature/ Movement Artist
London, United Kingdom
DJ
(30 November 2024)
My Little Pony Rave
Its Not A Phase
Off The Cuff
London, United Kingdom
(19 November 2024)
[RRHO4] DJ 小 HIAO “HIAO CHIOBU OF SUNNY SINGAPORE” Mix
Radio Repellent
Featured Artist
Soundcloud
London, United Kingdom
(21 August 2024)
FREE 4 ALL
0116internetculture X Bakunawa Entertainment
Four Quarters Peckham
London, United Kingdom
(15 August 2024)
Margins Pop-Ups
Eastern Margins
The Steam Room
London, United Kingdom
(31 May 2024)
OPIA MYSPACE
Opia
Unit58
London, United Kingdom
(27 April 2024)
K2Y.mp3
Undisclosed Location
London, United Kingdom
(31 March 2024)
K2Y.mp3
Protocol, Vauxhall Arches
London, United Kingdom
(22 March 2024)
CLUBPOC
The Yard Theatre
London, United Kingdom
Tattoo
(March - April 2023)
Artist
Casa Chisme
London, United Kingdom
(10 - 11 December 2022)
barang shop!!!
Studio Lotusroot
London, United Kingdom
Work Experience
(2024 - Present)
International Liaison and Social Media Junior Fellow
Goldsmiths, University of London Art Department
London, United Kingdom
(2019)
Programming Intern
The Substation
Singapore, Singapore
2024
(Edited verison to be published by Xeno-Futurism in January 2025)
Supervised by Dr. Alice Andrews
Goldsmiths, University of London
Their love is felt – passed down from generations down, even before my existence on this material plane.
飲水思源
Yin shui si yuan
Chinese proverb,
“When you drink water, think of the source.”
Preview
1.1. Daoist Philosophy, Internet Technology, Cyberfeminism and Cosmotechnics: Narrow Approaches to Human-Cyberspace Relationships
In the binary digits, the basis of computer language, technology and command executions, exist the traces of Taoist knowledge and celestial mathematics. [3]
The genesis of this project was a deep fascination towards how Daoist philosophy is foundational to and inherently encoded into the technology that gives rise to the internet and cyberspace. This will be on the basis that the conception of binary code used in computing was influenced by the I Ching (易經) or Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese text that elucidates concepts central to Daoist philosophy. [4] Through Yuk Hui’s Art and Cosmotechnics [5], I hope to employ a focused discussion on aesthetics through Daoist logic in Shanshui (山水) painting [6] [7] as a Cosmotechnical methodology which can remedy conventionally racist and exclusionary Cyberfeminist thought and writing.
I also have observed that Cyberfeminist activism has shortcomings that lie in “educated, white, upper-middle-class, English-speaking, culturally sophisticated readership,” [8] ironically echoing the “damaging universalism” of previous Feminist movements [9], which runs counter to its purported liberatory qualities. [10]
Figure 1. Entry 1 – 28. Cyberfeminism Index, 2023. [Screenshot author’s own]. Accessed July 5, 2024. https://cyberfeminismindex.com/.
Concurrently, the resurgence in popularity of Cyberfeminism in the 2020s has meant that the decades-long lineage of utopian theories at the “intersection of computer technology and subversive feminist counterculture” [11] has become very relevant in discussions of this technological age. Its beginnings can be traced back to Donna Haraway’s 1985 seminal text, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, and is the first entry in Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index. [12] (Figure 1.)
Both Hui’s work and Cyberfeminism have inspired a central motive for this project – to utilise this strategy for expanding approaches to relationships between humans and cyberspace, with Cosmotechnics as a conceptual tool play in reconciling such human-cyberspace relationships, and to explore how Daoist philosophy through aesthetics solves the limitations of Cyberfeminism’s utopic visions of our relationship with cyberspace. Thus, could Daoism present a solution to expand narrow approaches to human-cyberspace relationships?
[3] Eng, Alvin Hui Lim, Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance (2018), 160.
[4] Eng, Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance, 160.
[5] Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics.
[6] Shanshui (山水) painting, or Shanshuihua (山水畫) translates to “paintings of mountains and rivers”. Shanshui (山水) is a genre of Chinese monumental landscape painting that developed during the Wei, Tsin and Six Dynasties eras (220-589) and the Five Dynasties period (907-60).
Fong, Wen C., Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, Eighth–Fourteenth Century (New York, New Haven and London: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 1992). https://cdn.sanity.io/files/cctd4ker/production/22adb7b9e723c11398839fecda4e5d584b04305e.pdf.
[7] Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics.
[8] Fernandez, Maria, Wilding, Faith, and Wright, Michelle M., eds., Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices (2002), 21.
[9] Fernandez, Wilding, and Wright, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, 21.
[10] Hall, Kira, "Computer-mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-cultural Perspectives," in Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, ed. Herring, Susan C. (John Benjamins, 1996), 148.
[11] Hall, "Computer-mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-cultural Perspectives," 148.
[12] "Cyberfeminism Index," 2022, accessed July 5, 2024, https://cyberfeminismindex.com/.
Table of Contents
List of Figures 6
1.Introduction 10
1.1. Daoist Philosophy, Internet Technology, Cyberfeminism and Cosmotechnics: Narrow
Approaches to Human-Cyberspace Relationships 10
1.2. Two Key Problematics within Cyberfeminism 13
1.2.1. First Problematic: Manifesto, Utopia and Hyperstitional Logic 14
1.2.2. Second Problematic: Lack of Consideration of Post-Colonial Perspectives 18
1.3. Expanding Narrow Approaches to Human-Cyberspace Relationships 19
1.4. Art, Technology and Post-European Philosophy: Cosmotechnics, Techne, Technics 21
2. Chapter 1: Roots, Aesthetics, Cosmologies and Localities 26
2.1. Root: On Cosmotechnics 26
2.2. Aesthetics: On Shanshui (山水) Painting 29
2.3. On Daoism 33
2.3.1. Localities 33
2.3.2. Cosmologies 37
3. Chapter 2: Daoist Logic – “反者道之動 (Opposition, or turning back, constitutes the
dynamic of Dao)” 40
3.1. Daoist Logic of Shanshui (山水) 40
3.2. Xuan (玄) Logic: Recursivity, Oppositional Continuity and Oppositional Unity41
3.2.1 Recursivity 41
3.2.2. Oppositional Unity 44
3.2.3. Oppositional Continuity 46
4. Chapter 3: Daoist Logic of Shanshui (山水) – Early Spring (早春圖) by Guo Xi (郭熙) 49
4.1. Xing (形) and Xiang (象) 55
4.2. Xuan (玄) Logic 59
5. Chapter 4: The Mountain, The Water and The Alien – Basho, Hyperstition and
Cosmotechnics 63
5.1. Aesthetics: Shanshui (山水) and Xenofeminism 63
5.1.1. Hyperstitional Logic: Alien 68
5.1.2. Basho Logic: Mountain-Water 71
5.1.3. Cosmotechnics: Mountain-Water versus the Alien 74
6. Conclusion 78
6.1. Daoist Philosophy: Expanding Approaches to Human-Cyberspace Relationships 78
6.2. Cosmotechnics to Beyond 80
7. Appendix 84
7.1. Glossary of Chinese Terms and Concepts 84
7.2. Acknowledgements 87
8. Bibliography 89
Contact Lamceline.ty@gmail.com