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​353: preface to the orchid pavilion (wang xizhi) c. 1050: taijitu, protocybernetic diagram of processual becoming (zhou dunyi) 1884: nipkow disk patented in berlin, first raster scanner 1935: “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” cinematic aesthetics (walter benjamin) 1954: engineering cybernetics (qian xuesen) 1962: bressenham algorithm for line rasterization 1964: understanding media, “the tv image…is not a photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning finger” (marshall mcluhan) 1966: telemusik (karlheinz stockhausen) 1971: “four criteria of electronic music,” unified time structuring of form and frequency (karlheinz stockhausen) 1972: brain of the firm, applied cybernetic management (stafford beer) 1973: pinochet coup terminates cybersyn, allende’s experiment with automated cybernetic socialist management 1975: “tv as a medium and its relation to culture,” aesthetics of television production (stuart hall) 1979: beginning of dengist reforms and market economy in china 1979: beijing advertising agency established 1979: “grids” (rosalind krauss) 1983: first cctv new year’s gala broadcast 1984: first olympic games broadcast in the prc 1990: “postscript on the societies of control,” algorithmic capital (gilles deleuze) 1990-5: copying the preface to the orchid pavilion one thousand times (qiu zhijie) 2006: zidane, a 21st century portrait, zinedine zidane filmed with 17 synchronized cameras during la liga 2005 (douglas gordon and philippe parreno) 2013: chronopoetics, sonicity (characteristic rhythms and frequencies) of technical media (wolfgang ernst) 2023: xiaomi debuts the hyper imp dark factory

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Rejecting “common practices” of audiovisual music like interactivity and live-generated visuals (which prioritize seamless syntheses of sound and video), orchid pavilion emerges from an analysis of ensemble and live-video as two technologies embedded in historical and contradictory systems of production, labor, and control. The ensemble is considered as a mass of bodies—and thus intertwined with a history of both mass production and mass politics. Conversely, the aesthetics of live-video, epitomized as studio television, point to automation, digitization, and privatization—particularly when examined in the context of 80s China, when the widespread adoption of household television sets (and therefore television culture) paralleled the marketization of the Chinese economy. As Xiao Liu has noted, media shifts in the reform era mapped the transformation of the representative Chinese subject from industrial proletarian to expert technocrat.

            orchid pavilion’s analysis of television/video as automation and digitization takes cues from Wolfgang Ernst’s chronopoetics (i.e., the analysis of media technologies as primarily temporal processes) by considering television’s line-scanning mechanism: from its beginnings in the Nipkow disk, television has operated as a distinctive process of analyzing two-dimensional images as linear streams of points. This linear analysis lends itself to transmission and is recomposed on the receiver end (at speeds beyond human perception) via the drawing hand of an electron beam. Television’s linearization/

pixelization is understood as a foundational model for the digitization and quantization characteristic of an information economy. The rhythms of line scanning become uncanny writing, and hence in the Chinese context a parallel between the new technocrat and the “traditional” Confucian bureaucrat wielding power through the literate brush. The velocity required for the electron beam to “fuse” into two-dimensional images reaches into the technological sublime, toward a sonics of quantity, saturation, and fusion. And the television studio as a model of technocratic bureaucracy, with its carefully coordinated cameras and broadcast schedules (see Stuart Hall), points to contradictory histories and utopias of automation and cybernetic control (from both before and after Deng’s reforms).

            These intertwined strata are refracted through the prism of a representative work of 90s art in China—Qiu Zhijie’s Copying the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion One Thousand Times (1990-1995). In imperial times, calligraphy initiates of the scholar class repetitively copied canonic masterworks from history—a history that often begins with Wang Xizhi’s 353 calligraphic masterwork Preface to the Orchid Pavilion. In replicating Wang Xizhi’s example a thousand times onto a single sheet, Qiu Zhijie’s repetitions accumulate into a single black rectangle. orchid pavilion takes the 324 characters of Wang Xizhi’s text as its background structure, with each line tracing an ascending arpeggio.

            orchid pavilion notably features a video capture system involving three cameras positioned on servo motors, each with pre-programmed complex trajectories. Additionally, computer-rendered imagery of various sculptural screens, pixel matrices, Nipkow disks, and TV sets interrupt the live camera feeds. Against filmic priorities like scene composition, orchid pavilion prioritizes the temporality, rhythm, and polyphony of camera movement and montage. As in Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (which tracks Zidane throughout the 2005 La Liga final with 17 simultaneous cameras), television is abstracted into forms of real-time motion and coordination. Similarly, temporal considerations characterize the 3d renderings, including polyrhythmic strobe effects projected by a virtual RGB CRT projector and slow motion line-scanning drawn by a virtual pixel beam, with its constant speed changes synchronized with a spinning (Duchampian) Nipkow disk.