The overwhelming emphasis on science in Chinese society and its education system means that analyzing and discussing science and technology has become central to the culture today, much as explorations of urbanism and cultural change were a generation ago. If a decade ago the Chinese economy manufactured products for the West, and elites sought to join or access the West via emigration, education, and real estate, today the dynamic parts of Chinese society are aimed at creating popularly accessible technology to improve the lives of Chinese people—and then export it to the Global South.

Our mind makes predictions about what it thinks we will see, and shows us hallucinated projections of the near future. When a baseball batter sees a ball traveling towards them, they’re not seeing the actual ball, but a hallucinated projection of where the mind thinks the ball will travel. The batter swings at the hallucination. If all goes well, the hallucinated ball is temporally synched to where the actual ball should be. When we zoom out from the mechanics of motor function and temporal synchronization, the story of visual perception becomes even more unstable.

We can think of magic as a type of media. One that operates in the world of preconscious perception, playing with associations, expectations, symbols, and other forms of media to alter perception, to influence behavior, to affect the physical world, and to produce any number of other effects. To study magic is to study the quirks, foibles, and everyday hallucinations that characterize human perception, and to use those gaps between reality-as-it-is and reality-as-it-is-perceived as a vehicle for making supernatural-seeming interventions into perceived reality.

If post-socialist critique is reductive, individual artists and curators are not the sole culprits—nor are MoMA, Guggenheim, or liberal cultural institutions. The Communist Party of Vietnam has itself perpetuated a corrupt version of its own history, erasing vibrant internal debates and silencing opposition to state communism, whether from within a Marxist framework or against it. Post-socialist art vividly reflects the strange mutations undergone by the current Party, which has drastically departed from, yet still rides on, its communist identity. It remains important to inquire, at each instance, whether the appropriation of state-socialist aesthetics illuminates the present’s relationship with the past or obfuscates it further.

If the postwar media landscape was characterized by spectacle, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first century by an age of surveillance, then we are entering a new phase. One marked by affective computing, machine learning–enabled optimization, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. A mediascape that has little use for distinctions between real and fake, signifier and signified. That assumes no distinction between perception and reality even as it attempts to intervene as directly as possible into the brains and emotional makeups of its experiencers.

There was a structure. Things which were revealed were sealed. It was done in such an orderly fashion because, of course, these things were classified. Now they’re unclassified, but they’re still classified in a way because we don’t see all the evidence or facts that had apparently been gathered. It’s decorative to a certain extent: what is revealed and what is unrevealed, what is fact and what is fiction. So then it’s about what the spectator projects onto those files. The blackness was almost like holes within the system. Those holes tell you a lot about the failures of state surveillance, and more than anything, about the triumphs of the Robesons.

Coined by the renowned German filmmaker, artist, and writer Harun Farocki, the term “operational images” appeared in the early 2000s in his video installation trilogy Eye/Machine I-III (2001–3), which investigates autonomous weapon systems, machine vision in industrial and other applications, and the broader move from representations to the primacy of operations. Farocki’s film installation series presents this shift as a particular kind of image that emerges in those institutional practices, although it also articulates the shift through the various histories and spaces that condition both the emergence of such images and their industrial base: these include military test facilities, archives, laboratories, and factories.