Back to life

So I realized that this blog is overrun by football posts, which is very strange since UNIT has absolutely nothing to do with football, and actually I’m not even that into football. But what can I say, the caught the spirit, and went a little over the top with it. But the is point what the hell is going on with UNIT.

I’ve been in Beijing for about two weeks now presenting the work we’ve done so far, hearing reactions, getting advice, and seeing if anyone up here can help us move forward.

Last week, media artist Yang Lei (杨磊) and I had a joint presentation at Salon, a venue for presenting and discussing new creative projects organized by my friend Andre Schmidt. Lei presented “b.tween 2 cultures” – a web-based visual dialog between China and the UK, done in collaboration with internationally renowned creative technologists Soda. (Check the site for a more detailed explanation of the concept and how it actually works.) He’d just come back from debuting the project at the b.TWEEN 06 interactive media festival in Bradford, UK, where it was shown on monitors around the site. He has plans for taking to a much grander scale though, and, like me, he was presenting a project in its very early stages.

I gave a short presentation of the just released UNIT 01 then showed UNIT 02, the first full-fledged issue we’ve made since coming to China. The story of UNIT 02 is a sad little parable on “strategic misunderstanding” - a powerful tool against which anyone attempting to do business in a place without speaking its language is vulnerable.

Originally, UNIT 02 was supposed to be released as UNIT 01. The issue was meant to be reflection of the magazine that it was a supplement to, the theme of which was “Dutchness”. We thought, if the main magazine is going to be based on a Chinese writer traveling to Holland to report on Dutch design, we’d make our supplement about Dutch designers who travel to China to work. In the end, we stretched it out a bit to include more facets of Sino-Dutch collaboration, but we were happy with the result, and ready to get that sumbitch out on the streets. But then, a couple days before print deadline, we were told that, due to a misunderstanding (on whose part? due to what? never explained.), UNIT would have to be radically reduced in size (radical like 80% reduced). So we bugged out, but eventually decided to roll with it, and the result was the official UNIT 01 - an introduction to UNIT, without any of the material that was originally intended for it.

It’s now a little unclear if/when UNIT 02 will be released, but it’s not all bad. Through the process of making it we figured out how to work together, who to trust (no one!), and most important what UNIT can be. So it now seems that the template we created for the Dutch issue - exploring China’s relationship another country through personal stories and experiences - will be followed in the UNIT’s to come. There are a lot of unknown factors, but we really think this has the potential to be an important project.

So, in a nutshell, I explained that at the Salon, then received reactions of varying degrees of support and skepticism.

A couple of people also said, “Ok, so this is a nice magazine, but you seem to be implying that’s it’s going to be more. I’m curious to see what else UNIT is going to be.” And I was like, “Word, me too.” So I take that as words of encouragement/challenge to start branching UNIT out asap, and I guess this and our recently launched website is a small step in that direction.

The quote of the night came from Lei though: upon being asked by a typically cynical architect whether he thought it’d really be possible to do projections of b.tween2cultures images on the facade of the CCTV headquarters now under construction in Beijing’s CBD, Lei replied, “I am a naive dreamer, so….”

b.tween2cultures.net
b.tween festival
soda