Life, Living Organisms, and Lost Histories
Live Live Seafood, 2013, Ding-yeh Wang, Haoshin Chang, installations, CC BY-SA
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Technoanimal
Presentation Title:
- Life, Living Organisms, and Lost Histories
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Live Live Seafood addresses the dominant distribution of occidental culture articulating the common perceiving in the development of science, and further questions the absence of the diversity of historical narratives in the current world of science, or in Joseph Needham’s implication of a singular non-mutual influence of science and technology by the West on these once advanced civilizations. [1] Biology as a common subject or field of interest with a variety of approaches rooted around cultural groups, and by a series of representation for a fictional account, the work surfaces a possible scenario of multiregional origin of knowledge and techniques in the modern era.
The discovery that led to modern electrophysiology was originated from Luigi Galvani’s popular legend of the incident in his experiment on static electricity. [2] In the age when the existence of atomic particles were yet to be confirmed, Vitalism was regarded as the explanation for the cause of the living form, and to this holistic perspective, Galvanism – the kicking legs of the dead frog and the resurrection of the executed murderer was perceived as a monument of mankind manipulating life through electricity, crossing the boundary between man and god. The subject in science eventually spread into other fields, resulting indirectly in cultural products such as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Cultivating new ideas and creative approaches would remain in vain without a cultural content as the medium and modern scientific methods has been grown out of the heterogeneous soil. In an attempt to cultivate a translational basis for grafting the techniques to a different context, the project presents several documents and a set of videos to articulate a narrative of a fictional incident in a seafood restaurant seen in Southeast Asia, and raise up a Chinese exercpt from Tao Zongyi as a tip of an overseen context [3].
