Shanghai
China
Metal Drawl Powerlines Cicada,
Metal Drawl Cicada Powerlines,
Powerlines Cicada Metal Drawl,
Powerlines Metal Drawl Cicada,
Cicada Powerlines Metal Drawl,
Cicada Metal Drawl Powerlines—a scene, recalibrating its shape as it goes.
Picture a cartoon fray. A vapor, a ruckus, a camaraderie of fidelities.
Cicada Powerlines Metal Drawl is a multi-platform ecosystem designed as: (1) legato infrastructure, (2) an open beta, (3) an engine, (4) a cascade of speech assemblies spanning across YouTube, WeChat, bulk sms, Mailchimp, home server, and more, now and over the coming months.
These assemblies assume many forms and many modes of address. They are multi-protagonist, collisionary, trans-continental, civilizationally unstable, contingent, diverse and varying in intensity, and expressed in polyphony. Assembles happen whenever they happen, spanning time horizons and scales with ease—humming an engine disposition for a tornado’s span.
In place of a map, a forecast.
Scratch disk, hosted on thismightnotbe.online—a home server in Delhi. It’s unstable, precarious, always under construction, and for now hosts a storm of powerlines, cicadas, metal drawls, and also a museum. The storm will brew, signal, chew, spit, turn, and sit on browsers as a restless open tab.
Episodes, formulated in the afterglow of an afterglow with Hemant Sreekumar—mood, season, weather pattern, and relay with many protagonists and many occupations of many time horizons in a spin of noun strings, helicopter blades, air conditioner fans, and a meteor’s hiss. Episodes come with noise and claims on the world, then an infinite pan, then an album, then a formation and a naptime, then a torpor, then an incident. These episodes take place regularly, moving from platform to platform.
Newsletter, written by Wing Chan as rolling correspondence, wakes up to find themselves sitting next to a cigar factory lector on the second floor. They might wake up to your screen as a wall, a paper that curls and rolls, a crease, a water body, a sea navigator, a taxi driver’s guide, a big nap, a musician with extra skins, and a very good forest with an unstable storm sitting next that chews and turns.
Playlist, made by Amiya Nagpal—as tempo, as a time, as recitation, as accompaniment—is mutable, porous and ready to party. It is good for morningtime, coffeetime, karaoke, on the shitter, at night. Solo, companioned, trespassing. You might find conversation, new sounds, old flames updated sporadically. It hopes for sunny days but preps for rainy ones too.
Incidents, convened by Aarushi Surana & Kaushal Sapre, formulated as coagulations, lags or gut recall—discordant, minor and ephemeral. In systems that imagine themselves as highly ordered, incidents are more often than not perceived as violations or accidents. Whereas existence in the biplanar can be contingent upon appearing only as a cluster of incidents. They may be felt as tremors in a pocket, heard in the bicker between currency rates or in a microtransaction, seen during a game of chess or in a film screening, tasted in the third bite of a cookie or in the receipt of its purchase. They may happen to you, be narrated to you or behind you.
Personas, designed with Mo Mo Wu Wen to disaggregate visual identity templatization, calling an ensemble of appearances across accounts and platforms to meet, metabolize and deliberate incidents, episodes, newsletters, playlists, and scratch disks.
Powerlines Cicada Metal Drawl invites thought as team sport; issues invitations that multiply, far exceeding the imagination of the invitation. What is consistent is disposition. The mechanics are elastic. The mechanics are thought. The claim is: not to make things but to make things happen. The claim is: to apply thought to make matter. The claim is: to make claims, confidently and in the company of contemporaries and co-journeyers, to dive into the fray, to be with the world.
Cicada Metal Drawl Powerlines is curated by Lantian Xie in response to an invitation by Curatorial Practices in Asia, a research platform initiated and supported by Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.
