XÙN解读｜“祖细迟滞——李佳宝个展”作品阐释（一）

Speak or breathe into our specialized CO2 collector. For those who wish to articulate their thoughts, we provide a range of prompts: excerpts from the Paris Climate Accord, highlighting our critical mission to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C within the next seven years; examples of corporate greenwashing with their catchy yet hollow phrases; or a space for personal confession on your carbon footprint. In real-time, you will see how much CO2 your breath or speech is emitting and how much algae can grow out of it. Our advanced direct air carbon capture and sequestration (DACCS) system will then take your CO2 through heating, spinning, bathing in chemicals, and finally turning it into nutrition for the algae. 

To remove CO2, Carbon Farm(er) blows air over a chemical sorbent bed that forms a weak bond with CO2 molecules. This chemical bed is the widest part of the metal hourglass, and is where the CO2 you breathe into the system gets trapped! Like a sponge, this chemical eventually gets saturated, which then prompts our desorption cycle. In this state, the chemical is heated which has the effect of squeezing our chemical sponge, releasing concentrated CO2 which is more readily taken up by our algae. What matters most, though, is what we do with that algae, since algae left to decompose will be digested by microbes, re-releasing the carbon that we just stored.

In that vein, we harvest this algae regularly, converting it into eco-friendly, degradable bioplastics. In recognition of your contribution, you will receive an algae bioplastic badge with your last name. Moreover, our Carbon Farm also nurtures Spirulina, a nutrient-rich algae. This edible variant of your contributions is transformed into delectable culinary creations, served during our unique dining performances. It's a full-circle experience: your words and breath transformed into nourishment, returning to sustain you. 

By contributing their CO2 to the Carbon Farm, participants are invited to reflect on their relationship with non-human living systems, the planet, the atmosphere, and their individual impact on climate change. Beyond its artistic value, the Carbon Farm serves a practical purpose as a household-scale carbon sequestration unit. Similar to the widespread adoption of rain catchers, the Carbon Farm could be implemented in homes to capture atmospheric CO2, converting it into edible algae-based snacks. However, it's important to note that carbon removal, in its current form, is not a comprehensive solution to climate change. Carbon removal is only useful in creating a net-neutral world if there are massive amounts of emissions mitigation from world leaders, companies, and consumers. Though a necessary tool, carbon removal cannot be used as an excuse by nations as a false panacea providing the moral ease of mind for our fossil fuel addiction. For perspective, one would need to capture every breath into the Carbon Farm for an entire year to offset the personal carbon footprint of a one-way cross-country flight in China.

在进化树上，人类和章鱼在 5 亿年前分离。他们在一条于人类不同的道路上将分布式智能进化到了极致。那我想，如果世界不是以人类为中心，而是以章鱼为中心呢？在这个我们想象的世界里，全球变暖导致海平面上升，所有大陆都被淹没在水下。作为海洋中高度智能的物种，章鱼解锁了产后释放自毁激素的基因。于是他们可以将祖先的智慧代代相传。“人类世”结束，地球进入“Chthulucene 触生世”。

当人类因环境破坏而濒临灭绝时，我们如何设计一个优雅的灭绝？我们能创造什么让接下来的物种，在这里是章鱼，会以一点点温柔和同情来记住我们？在这个初次尝试中，我们试图通过学习章鱼的行为，通过种间形变与章鱼建立联系。从人类至上的世界观转变为我们必须适应和学习其他物种的世界；从中央控制的大脑转向分布式智能；将我们的视觉主导感官转变为触觉感知。

On the evolutionary tree, humans and octopuses separated 500 million years ago. And they evolved distributed intelligence into a completely different extreme than humans. What if the world is not centered around humans but octopuses? We imagine a world where global warming causes sea levels to rise and all continents are submerged underwater. As a highly intelligent species in the ocean, the octopuses have unlocked the optic gland gene that releases self-destructing hormones after giving birth. Now they can pass on the wisdom of their ancestors from generation to generation. The "Anthropocene" ends, and the earth enters the "Chthulucene." 

When humans are on the edge of extinction due to environmental breakdown, how can we design an elegant extinction? What can we create so that the upcoming species, in this case, the octopus, will remember us with a little bit of tenderness and empathy? In the first attempt, we try to connect with octopuses through learning their movements, through interspecies metamorphosis. Shifting from human supremacy worldview to a world where we have to adapt and learn the becoming of other species; shifting from the central governed brain to distributed intelligence; shifting our visual dominated senses to tactile perception.

我们在国家之间建立边界和高墙，有些会阻碍野生动物迁徙。这些动物原本不需要关心人为的边境线，但却要被迫承认国家之间的差异并选择站队在某一边。一个月后，这个墨鱼从墨鱼的视角完全重新诠释了我们人造的地图和边境线。人类为之反复征战的地图，在墨鱼眼中，它是按照墨鱼自己的方式绘制的。

I worked with Kewalo Marine Biology Lab in Hawaii. While the scientists were studying the squid, I noticed that the squids in the lab sat in boring white tanks all day long. So I wonder if I could make their environment more interesting by building a playground for them. I collect the white sand and black sand from Hawaii islands and make them into certain countries' shapes. While the squid was living there. He carries the sand from one side to the other and spreads it around. He swims back and forth between the countries, across the borders without a Visa. He buries himself under the sand and uses his cute little tentacles to push the sand on his face as a camouflage. Watching the squid reminds me of myself in many ways as an immigrant: moving between China and the US, carrying the baggage of two cultures, trying to assimilate to blend in, and found myself in this situation like the squid: he has white sand on his body but black sand on the top, sitting in the middle of black surrounded by white -- but feeling perfectly camouflaged.

We build borders between our countries that can block natural animal migrations. Animals that would not care about the delineation between countries are forced to recognize the difference and take a side. After a month, the squid completely reinterprets our human-made maps and borders from the squid's perspective. The map humans have repetitively fought wars for, in the eyes of the squid, is drawn on their own terms.

《冰川往事》是一部关于一个女孩和她与冰川的关系的虚拟现实电影。随着女孩年龄的增长，这块冰受到了威胁，观众开始了一段看似徒劳的旅程，以保护曾经是整个冰川的地方。这个故事的灵感来源于艺术家李佳宝在阿拉斯加的生活经历，她是在那里保护来自冰川的一块冰的女孩。在阿拉斯加西北部的土著部落因纽皮雅特传统故事中，冰川承载着过去的记忆，并通过冰川的歌声传达她们的记忆。气候危机已经成为一个可怕的现实，包括看到冰川的终结——这些歌唱记忆的终结——就在我们有生之年发生在我们眼前。《Once a Glacier》是一种照料，无论女孩的努力是否成功，这件作品都暗示了一种令人心酸的优雅和谦卑，以迎接未来。

导演，编剧：李佳宝

监制创意制片：郭沁雅

声音：Matt McCorkle

VR艺术家：Denis Semenov

3D 艺术家：Kirill Klochkov

诗人：Joan Naviyuk Kane

插图：尉博翔

奶奶配音：Carolyn Nahyoumaurak

女孩配音：Annika Schmidt

制片统筹：Cooper Galvin

Once a Glacier tells the story of a relationship between a girl and a glacier. As the girl grows older, the existence of the ice is threatened, and the viewer is taken on a journey through her seemingly futile efforts to protect what was once an entire glacier. The story is inspired by Jiabao Li’s own experience from two years she lived in Alaska, where she was the young girl protecting a piece of ice in the freezer. In Inupiaq tradition, a tribe of indigenous people from northwestern Alaska, glaciers carry memories from the past and communicate them in song. The climate crisis has become a terrifying reality that includes seeing the end of glaciers—the end of these sung histories—happen before our eyes. Once a Glacier shows a gesture of nurturing, and whether the girl’s efforts are successful, the work suggests a poignant level of grace and humility for moving forward into the future. 

The team recorded the sound on the glaciers in Alaska and modeled the glaciers from the satellite data of Matanuska glaciers, to document the disappearing nature. The VR film relates the life of a human to natural phenomena. We think of nature's time scale as millions of years and humans’ are under a hundred, yet with the current speed of climate change, many glaciers are vanishing within our lifetime. Glacial time, once was slow, is now fast. By telling the story of the life journey of a piece of glacial ice and its glacier of origin along with the life of a girl, the film makes this human-nature timescale tangible. 

冰川消融是全球变暖最为显著的证据。此系列作品，承载着冰川的惊艳之美、变幻之迅速、脆弱之力、毁灭之能，以及宏伟之姿。同时，它们展示了全球变暖导致的剧烈且不可逆的生态损害。

我将过去 60 年冰川融化的数据与阿拉斯加本地音乐家一起创作成音乐和舞蹈，这些音乐家在他们的一生中目睹了Mendenhall冰川的衰退和消失。每一个音符是一个季节。冬季，冰川冻结，音调低沉；夏季，融化加剧，音调升高。在这里，冰川自身的声音、融化数据和表演者目睹消融的切身体验在冰川挽歌里成为了未来的记忆。

Glaciers are sentinels of climate change. They are the most visible evidence of global warming today. This series of works embodies the stunning beauty, rapid change, fragility, destructive power, and magnificence of glaciers. At the same time, they challenge the audience with the dramatic, irreversible ecological damages from climate change.

In Glacier’s Lament, we used data from glacier melting in the past 60 years to compose music and dance with local musicians who have witnessed the recession of the Mendenhall glacier over their lifetimes in Juneau, Alaska. Each note is one season in a year. In the winter, the glacier is frozen, so the pitch is low. In the summer, the melting rate rises, so the pitch is high. Here, the glacier’s own sound, the melting data, and the performers’ lived experience meld into Glacier’s lament. 

I visit my glacier friends in Alaska every year. Each time, I see their bodies rapidly disappearing. The speed of this change is no longer what we once considered as 'deep time'. 'Time Sensitive' is a series of attempts to compress and decompress time.

In front of the glaciers, I draw them on rocks using the melted glacier river. The sun continuously evaporates my painting. I chase time to draw, while the glaciers in my painting keep disappearing.

I use cyanotype to document the newly formed ecosystems on the islands after the glaciers melt: the glacier ice that melts under the sun, the feathers of Arctic terns that migrate to the islands, and the fireweed that are the first to grow after the glaciers retreat.

Every year, 2 billion wild animals become victims of roadkill. For reference, approximately 1 million humans die in traffic accidents each year. Roadkill has become a significant cause of death and even extinction of various species. These animals, following their natural instincts, traverse roads, oblivious to the concept of vehicles and the dangers they pose. As human expansion continues, the conflict between wildlife habitats and human development intensifies, often with tragic consequences.

With the development of self-driving cars such as WAYMO, computer vision and AI could detect the crossing animals more quickly and react to avoid collisions. While we talk about the morality of self-driving cars, we talk about passenger priority mode or pedestrian priority mode. Can we have a wildlife priority mode with the goal of recognizing wild animals and reducing collisions on them? 

I have been documenting photos of roadkill animals. It shocks me how flat they are after wheels and wheels over them. Some of them have embossed into the road, flattened like a carpet. This exhibition features carpets created from the images of these roadkill animals. A sweeping robot, an autonomous vehicle in its own right, navigates among these dead animal carpets, cleaning up the blood of these incidents.

/Reflect on Glaciers/

时长一天的装置 One-day long Installation

李佳宝，2020

于阿拉斯加的马塔努斯卡冰川前

艺术家将镜子

摆放在冰川融化形成的湖水上，面朝冰川 :

“这是曾经的我”

摆放在冰川上，面朝湖水:

“这将是我的未来”

Matanuska Glacier, Alaska, 2020

One-day long installation

Place the mirror

On the lake formed by melting glacier, facing the glacier:

“This was me.”

Place the mirror 

On the glacier, facing the lake:

“This is my future.”

李佳宝工作照

Work Photo of Jiabao Li