Trans-disciplinary Arts Institute Forum: The Art Bus to Drift
In an era when anyone can be an artist, the word “art” has become an overused label—one that nevertheless still seems to retain a certain distance. How, then, can art be accurately recognized or identified today? The imagination of art within the academy still appears to be separated from the general public by an excessively rigid boundary.
“How can we break through?”
Yet the position from which this question is asked is itself institutional: it belongs to the academy, to those who possess greater cultural capital, and even to a discourse that establishes hierarchy from the outset. Although art and life are often invoked as inseparable, we more often seem to withdraw from the crowd, enclosing ourselves within a paradise—a sanctuary—called art.
“Thus, we drive a BUS and drift through the city.”
Moving through sites dispersed beyond the academy—perhaps in the wilderness, perhaps in the city center, or perhaps at the urban periphery—we attempt to stage a form of urban guerrilla action through drifting. We intervene in and penetrate the heterogeneity of space, while distilling a heightened perception of place through movement. The BUS becomes a mobile spatial structure, linking one space to another.
Drifting is an unstable condition of movement. Along the routes that connect one point to another and one site to another, it struggles toward the limits of motion, the edges of madness, and the uncontrolled threshold of the unknown.
At the same time, drifting operates as a means of measuring abstract space. Through movement, it measures the distance between predetermined routes and their boundaries, between reality and madness. The moment of drifting is a moment of separation from reality—or, more precisely, a contingent state produced through the act of peeling away from reality and approaching madness.
Beyond serving as a means of transportation, what else can a moving BUS become? What qualities might its confined interior generate while drifting along the boundary between reality and madness? And what might the trajectory of its movement inscribe?
This is a journey from the everyday toward the loss of control. At the same time, drifting becomes a dynamic act of cultural measurement. Yet drifting can only approach the boundary of losing control without ever locating it precisely. It exists as an endless movement of attempting to come closer, closer still, and closer again…
Beyond the everyday, before madness.
設計 / 高登輝
1. The Art Bus to Drift —Temporary Guest House of St.Guandu
December, 2017
Text / Shih-Hsiang Tsai
Temporary Guesthouse
As a temporary space in motion, an ordinary BUS opens its public character to passengers only during specific periods of time. This promise constructs one dimension of everyday life. Today, however, the BUS departing from Fort San Domingo at Guandu attempts to displace its passengers from their habitual routes and carry them toward the edge of madness.
Each passing fragment of scenery marks reality and the everyday, while simultaneously indicating that we are now in a state of drifting—gradually distancing ourselves from reality, allowing the everyday to become other, and becoming spectators ourselves.
“At this moment, we are looking back upon a receding reality from a comparatively expansive field of vision.”
The BUS traverses the city and its peripheries in a wandering state, attempting to extract from its trajectory a thread through which spatial perception may be opened. By penetrating, intervening, returning, and roaming, it constructs mirages and imaginary cities, projecting and juxtaposing them within scenes of reality. Reality and illusion are layered upon one another, again and again, until they collapse into a soft and muddy mass. Perhaps only then can we perceive the absurdity writhing within it.
Throughout this journey, the BUS functions not merely as a temporary space, but as a mobile medium connecting tangible space with intangible perception. This mobility is jointly constituted by wandering and drifting.
Wandering describes the immediate condition of the BUS in motion, brushing across the terrain of reality with a certain passive gesture. Drifting, by contrast, is the abstract trajectory projected by the BUS beyond existing dimensions during the process of wandering, exchanging the reality within illusion for the illusion within reality.
Along the journey, we travel beside the river, touch and cross the edges of the city, and move from the everyday toward what lies beyond it. Within possible landscapes, we embed overlapping images of private histories. As we travel to and from the jungle, we attempt to search for oases within the cracks of concrete, to extract organic tissues concealed beneath a gray surface, and to lay obscure stories of everyday life across them.
As we penetrate the center and the periphery, reality and illusion, the present and history, the trajectory of wandering loosens existing boundaries. Through the paths opened by drifting, reality is summoned to return—to be deconstructed, reconstructed, and remade.
At the end of the journey, we eventually return from the vicinity of the edge to our point of origin in reality. Yet if wandering and drifting throughout the journey are understood as forms of spatial extension, and the return journey as a process of contraction after that extension, could the so-called point of origin—the everyday itself—be made to slip, shift, or become displaced?
設計 / 高登輝
2. The Art Bus to Drift —AirDrop to Taiwan X Jun-Honn Kao
June, 2018
1.“I Have an Inability Not to Love Taiwan” / Kao Jun-Honn
2. Forum Statement
The Art BUS to Drift: Airdropping Taiwan
In Response to Kao Jun-Honn’s Project Essay
Tsai Shih-Hsiang
And so, we become missiles.
In Airdropping Taiwan, we are participating in a game. At the same time, we take on the role of an Other confronting another unknown Other—someone and somewhere elsewhere.
The subject, an already exhausted term, is temporarily removed at the very beginning of the game. Whether it refers to an individual or a site, the subject is lost to uncertainty and disorientation the moment the dart leaves the hand, becoming a question held in suspension.
The ultimate purpose of this game is to reconsider, reassemble, and reaffirm the subject while remaining in a state of movement, flight, and bewilderment. What kind of dialectical relationship might emerge when two strangers encounter one another as mutual Others? It may be productive, misplaced, dispersed, passive, melancholic, or perhaps entirely empty.
In his project statement for Airdropping Taiwan, Kao Jun-Honn writes:
“This is a project that appears to be free, but is not truly free. It challenges our conventional understanding of art as ‘freedom’ and instead introduces an ambiguous contractual relationship. Yet this freedom within unfreedom may, in fact, constitute the ‘scene of social realism’ that emerges when artistic ideas encounter a production mechanism structured by rules and restrictions.”
This strikingly realistic description appears, to some extent, to echo the time and place in which we find ourselves. Amid anxieties and mixed emotions extending across generations, how should we confront freedom in Taiwan in 2018?
Should freedom itself still be considered a question?
In last semester’s The Art BUS to Drift: The Temporary Guesthouse of Holy Guandu, we sped away from everyday life, traversing and drifting between cities. Within brief gaps in time and space, we attempted to approach the edge of losing control and, from there, turn back to contemplate ourselves and others within everyday life.
In Airdropping Taiwan, our bodies are placed in a vacuum, oscillating between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. Scattered like missiles, some soar through the air, some sing softly in the fields, while others drift upon the sea. Their journeys extend from intercontinental wandering to expeditions through mountains and forests; some nearly retreat altogether into religious seclusion.
Our investigations of others, and our attempts to initiate dialogue with them, take place within the game’s predetermined frameworks of time and space. These constraints seem to remind us of our own insufficiency and powerlessness.
When people and landscapes are displaced from one another, whose composition do they perform, and what song do they sing?
Within this game, the launched missiles have not yet fallen to the ground. Even when the allotted time comes to an end, they may possess nothing more than a direction, their bodies suspended within the continuous present of flight.
Even so, we retain a certain degree of agency. When we look back, we can still see the place from which we departed, as well as the launcher that remains warm, emitting traces of white smoke.
Yet when we return to the language of reality, who is the missile, and who controls its launch and dispersal? Who, then, becomes the player of the game?
The world and its inhabitants overlap, intertwine, and become entangled with one another. Each simultaneously performs multiple roles and inhabits an indecipherable plurality of identities.
Who seeks to identify whom—and who is entitled to make such an identification?
Never mind.
Since we have already become missiles, we might as well remain in flight a little longer.
After all, until the moment we land, the so-called destination remains unknown.