Shu Lea Cheang: Good afternoon, everybody. We are going to conduct this conversation in English. Actually, I’m serving more as an artist and moderator during this conversation. I will introduce Paul B. Preciado and Audrey Tang in a dialog.

Shu Lea Cheang: I met Audrey Tang -- as Autrijus Tang -- in Taipei in 2002 in the hacker-marathon gathering somewhere downtown. At the time, I was commissioned to co-curate an online exhibition called Kingdom of Piracy for the now defunct Acer Digital Arts Center.

Shu Lea Cheang: Autrijus, as part of the Elixir Initiative, submitted a proposal titled "PiraPort" for the KOP show. It’s amazing that recently I bring up this proposal again and reread the proposal. I just going to quote from the proposal.

Shu Lea Cheang: "The PiraPort project explores the PiraGene sequencing technology to offer an alternative identity platform for pirates via gene discrimination, port multiplexing, and cross-signed trust chains." The project at the time, in 2002, was somehow never realized. [laughs] Did you reread this proposal?

Audrey Tang: I did.

Shu Lea Cheang: How you feel about the proposal now?

Audrey Tang: We say blockchain now.

Shu Lea Cheang: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: We say blockchain now... It was PiraChain back then, but it’s the same idea.

Shu Lea Cheang: Somehow, from 2002 to now, 2018, I think some of these topic we will be revisiting today, for sure. With Paul, I met Paul B. Preciado as Beatriz Preciado in Paris around the same time I met Autrijus. She walked into my studio with her bull dog. I think you always carry your dog with you. [laughs] Not carry, you walk your dog.

Shu Lea Cheang: That was such a moment I always remember in my studio in Paris in the Cité des Arts. I was doing a residency there. Somehow you feel the sunlight beams in. Since then, I have been collaborating with Preciado in different occasions.

Shu Lea Cheang: In 2008, Preciado brought me to Arteleku in Spain to stage...At the time, it was a performance piece and workshop called "FLUID." It was a exhibition called "Feminismo Porno Punk." I think somehow these three words always stay with me. I think a lot of my work carry the punk, the porn, and the feminisimo mode, yes. [laughs]

Shu Lea Cheang: This was the first time when Paul brought me to Arteleku. It was the first time I was able to realize this particular performance and workshop. It actually did happen. Before that, I was censored and shut down three times, in Norway, in Montreal, and in Berlin.

Shu Lea Cheang: By 2008, I was able to stage this performance. FLUID was a concept that I conceive in 2000 for the feature films. From then on, I really desire that I should realize this film. I conceive the project in 2000. It took me until 2017 to realize the project.

Shu Lea Cheang: There was the premier at the Biennale. The film title is "FLUID0". Again, Preciado brought me to the castle in Documenta’s public program to screen the film the same year, last year, after the film was released in Biennale.

Shu Lea Cheang: Both of them have really quite an interesting history and different kind of transition that we will be getting into. I was really happy to have this opportunity to bring the two together and have a talk together. I was going to read a bio, but I guess it’s on all the event page, so I will skip that then.

Shu Lea Cheang: I promise we’ll be very exciting. [laughs] As we say, we will have the Slido open, slido.com. To sign in, 3x3x6. We welcome all you to pose question, and we will come to it or do some intervention with the question. If you pose it, you can pose it in Chinese or in English. It’s no problem. I want to bring up just the first question to get us started, not so much that we would answer it.

Shu Lea Cheang: The first question, asked by "That cyborg has been avoided": "Who can guarantee that this art itself can be more democratic? First, in the art museum, the so-called People have long been disempowered."

Shu Lea Cheang: Shall we start? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Hello. We’re making the art more democratic by asking you to "like" each other’s questions.

Audrey Tang: If you see a question that you would also like us to talk about, just press like on your phone and so on. This is because it’s going to be more than two hour of us continuous talking. It will get kind of boring if you don’t have something to like on.

Audrey Tang: When you like each other’s questions, the one with the most number of like actually flow to the top, and therefore, Shu Lea sees it first. The chances are better when Shu Lea sees it first. She will be like a medium. You channel your energy through her into our discussion. She will be a representative to re-present your ideas.

Audrey Tang: That’s my take on this question. We basically use technology that enables people to still speak while we’re speaking. That’s the setting. Over to you, Paul.

Paul B. Preciado: Now? Yes. Hi, everyone. I’m really happy to be here. It’s really an honor to be in conversation with both of you.

Paul B. Preciado: I’m, of course, a friend of Shu Lea for a long time, and now have the pleasure to be the curator for the exhibition. I’m also a big fan of your work, so I’m delighted to be here. Let’s see if we are able to work together through the session in the sense that you are able to participate, ask questions, and be part of the conversation.

Paul B. Preciado: How can I say? I have to say that Shu Lea told me before not to talk too much about history, but I also told her, "History for me is just a science fiction because we know very little about our own history." When we speak about the museum, we tend to think that art and the museum are spaces for freedom.

Paul B. Preciado: I think that if we look back into the history of this institution, we realize that museums were first constituted as places where the trophies of military wars, military campaigns were collected. In a sense, the history of war and what I call necropolitics, the history of using violence and death as the only way of doing politics, is at the ground, at the bottom of these institutions.

Paul B. Preciado: Then, of course, the museum, through the 18th and 19th century, became one of the disciplinary institutions through which the idea of what is the national party, what is the history of a nation has to be constructed through a series of objects and memories that become part of these collections.

Paul B. Preciado: What is interesting is not just the museum. I would say that the museum is not, by itself, a democratic place. On the contrary, the museum is a place that has to be questioned constantly and where democracy has to be activated.

Paul B. Preciado: That’s what artists are doing, trying to bring these questions to the museum, de-colonizing the museum, depatriarchalizing the museum, meaning trying to criticize the gender, patriarchal, heterosexual politics that have been constituting the museum.

Paul B. Preciado: These are some of the questions that are now put in the museum and questioned, and maybe even transforming the museum even more. This is maybe a question for you, Audrey, because now with the Internet and the new technologies, what the museum is might be also a different question.

Paul B. Preciado: The museum might be not exactly these walls that we see here, but something else.

Audrey Tang: Right. Technologies works in a interesting way. When we turn my scribbles of Paul’s statements to a projector here that allows people to comment on it using Slido there, it makes them what we call social objects.

Audrey Tang: These are no longer objects like trophies are on display, but actually become things that people can take a photo on and share on social media or on any other places, and basically gets uploaded to the public Internet as part of the commons. I think that is a kind of overlay layer on top of any what we call spaces.

Audrey Tang: When we think about spaces, traditionally we think about it as one space, like one room that we are in, which is part of a larger place like the museum that we are in, which is part of a city perhaps, which is part of whatever. It’s a very topological view. Basically, the relationship is always containing one another.

Audrey Tang: The Internet, the part that is "inter-" is its core. It means that you can take any two places that are otherwise not containing each other by make links between them so that you can link through your phone from this place.

Audrey Tang: If you’re watching the live stream from another place, you can also receive the signal that we are having here through live-streaming -- and through echo, apparently -- then goes to this third place, which is Slido now, but there could be any other gathering place online, which is then projected back to this space.

Audrey Tang: This creates another relationship, what we call a link-based relationship. The link graph, the lines of links, and the place graph, the containing of spaces, those two together form what we call bigraph, which is at the same time a graph of spaces, but also a space of links.

Audrey Tang: These two together extends both the potentials of the initially limiting physical space, but it also redefines how those space interact with each other. Previously, we only have the laws of physics to work with.

Audrey Tang: We have the ambient soundscape. We have the optics. We have the physical laws of people feeling their bodies sitting next to each other, and so on. Now, overlaid with a link graph, we can put on VR glass and see all the empty chairs. Suddenly, people appear in them.

Audrey Tang: We can overlay two spaces together, and we can free up the spaces by introducing a new set of law, what we call code, that defines, just like physical law, what is possible, what is not, what is transparent, what is opaque, and so on, but essentially bring second layer of physics on top of the place-based physics.

Shu Lea Cheang: Can we get back to the title, what we set up to do today? "Democracy in Transition" is a big topic. Who want to scratch it? [laughs]

Paul B. Preciado: It partly has to do with our own political biography, in a sense, but also extends to thinking about the contemporary condition. I realized myself when I was transitioning. Let’s say, if you believe in gender binaries, this is a bigger discussion that we can have.

Paul B. Preciado: I do not believe in gender binaries, but we live within a gender-binary epistemology regime. This is the situation. Some of us, we’re trying to hack this regime or trying to hack this epistemology. I started to transition myself from 2004 using different technologies, using hormones, using other medical technologies, but also technologies of inscription.

Paul B. Preciado: For instance, changing the name, changing according to the law, and also writing because I consider writing. Then we can speak with Audrey, as well, what does it mean to write today within the code? Writing is one of the technologies of subject construction, of gender construction.

Paul B. Preciado: I started doing that in the early 2000s. Then, through a slow transition, I get to the point that I’m now. Let’s say this is continuing. Then I realized that it was not really myself that I was transitioning, not just even many of my friends and the people that I work with that were also transitioning, but that we were in a moment of planetary transition.

Paul B. Preciado: Basically, we are changing the paradigm and the regime in which we live in a similar way to the very radical and intense changes that were happening through the 15th century when the printing press was invented, with the advent of the first industrial revolution, and colonialism and globalization.

Paul B. Preciado: Now, I had the feeling and the impression that because of the transformation and the use of some of the technologies that had been developed during the Second World War, those technologies that I told you before that were necropolitical technologies, technologies of death.

Paul B. Preciado: If you think about from the nuclear bomb to all the other war technologies, this was the big festival of the Second World War. What happened after the Second World War is that these technologies of death transform into technologies of communication, technologies of transformation, and production of the body, and radically will change what we understand today not just for space.

Paul B. Preciado: Audrey was speaking about that a minute ago. The notion of a space today is not exactly the same that the one we had in the 15th century. Something similar is happening with the body within the contemporary condition.

Paul B. Preciado: Still, the notion that we have of democracy is very much an analog notion, in a sense, almost archeological notion of democracy. What I started to think about and I wanted to speak with Audrey and Shu Lea about is precisely what does it mean to act within this condition of, on one side, a change of paradigm?

Paul B. Preciado: What is this change of paradigm that we’re getting into with the advent of the new technologies and the Internet, but also, of course, the expansion of military and surveillance technologies? The Internet is also one of the military technologies so it’s not so clear if we are getting into a domain of control or if there is a possibility for action and agency. Therefore, what might be the role of the artist in all that?

Audrey Tang: When Paul said that Internet was a technology of the war, that is actually literal. It’s not a metaphor. The Internet started as a research project from DARPA, which is the defense arm of the US government.

Audrey Tang: The design of Internet is explicitly designed to maintain the communication after a nuclear war. That’s its design specification. We know a lot of ways to connect people together, but until the research team did the Internet Protocol, the IP Protocol, nobody really knows how to survive a communication network after the nuclear war.

Audrey Tang: They figure out this simple idea that they call end-to-end principle. It means that only the person initiating the conversation, the communication, and the people receiving the communication should determine the content. Everything in between can be changed.

Audrey Tang: It can be through optic lines. It could be through carrier pigeons.

Audrey Tang: No, there really is a document that describe how to use carrier pigeons to transmit Internet packets. It could be through trucks -- actually, there’s one about trucks with hard disk on the trucks -- or interplanetary rockets, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t care about the technologies that’s used in the middle, but it cares a lot about how to get, reliably, a signal from one person to another person. That’s called the end-to-end principle. That defines the Internet because nobody knows what will still work after a nuclear war. That was the defining characteristic of the Internet.

Audrey Tang: Of course, today, Internet is separate from the US itself. It declared sovereignty. It no longer respond to any of the US agencies anymore. The United Nations ITU wants to get Internet Society under its control, but the Internet Society never agreed. We only agreed to hold one yearly conference together called the Internet Governance Forum, which I appeared as a robot last year.

Audrey Tang: The idea, very simply, is that Internet itself, through radical transparency and through voluntary association, the two simple idea that any decision made about the Internet must be participatory by anyone on the Internet. This is a very simple idea.

Audrey Tang: The participation itself must also be public on the Internet through live-streaming and other technologies. It constantly reflects on itself. I think it is also a very artist thing to do. Internet, at the end, is about a lot of code that powers machines.

Audrey Tang: If you’re seeing the code as a regulator, as a lawyer, or as any top-down institutionalist, you will see it as something that’s written, like the Code of Hammurabi, the Code of Napoleon, the code of whatever. It will be something that is written like on a tablet, maybe not iPad, a stone tablet, and you cannot really change it freely.

Audrey Tang: Through this radical participation, the hackers of the Internet basically are invited to test the limit of Internet, to invent new uses, like blockchain, on the Internet, without asking for anyone’s permission. This what we call permissionless invention, meaning if you want to extend the Internet, only you and the person who are going to communicate with you need to agree on this new way of communication.

Audrey Tang: Nobody in between, including the earlier inventors of the Internet, they cannot say anything about it. This permissionless invention, or the idea of hacking on the Internet itself, is what enable Internet to still grow after all these decades.

Audrey Tang: I think it is a very artist’s take on code because if you’re a institutionalist, you would just keep the code running. You will not hack the code and you will not do permissionless invention. You will always ask for permission before inventing. The Internet, still today, is very artsy in the sense that it is permissionless invention.

Paul B. Preciado: It’s true that whenever I listen to you speaking, I have the impression that you are extremely Utopian, that your view of the Internet is really that we have full agency, that this is a space of maximum freedom. Nevertheless, I tend to have the impression that it’s also a space of enormous control.

Paul B. Preciado: How do you see that dialectic? I know the kind of activist work that you’ve been doing, hacktivism, but for everyone else, they might not be at the same level of expertise in terms of writing the code or having access to it.

Audrey Tang: That is true even though, theoretically, anyone can take any legal interpretation or legal regulation and change it because they are not under copyright. Any work by your lawyer and so on, by regulators, they’re not copyrighted. Theoretically, there is nothing preventing you from doing a legal change analysis or whatever.

Audrey Tang: Maybe through one of our sandbox mechanisms here in Taiwan, you can say, "OK, I want to try to this alternate version of regulation on my municipality for a year for everybody to see that it’s a good idea before the municipality adopts it as the new regulation. We have this system here.

Audrey Tang: Just having the sandbox system doesn’t automagically mean everybody become a lawmaker. It doesn’t automagically mean that people know where exactly in the regulation is the one that affects people’s lives. In fact, that is what the legal, civics, basic education is all about.

Audrey Tang: We can consider if it’s only a few people knowing how to use any technology -- I will use fire example because it’s easiest to conceptualize -- if you only allow a few priests or whatever to control the use of fire, and most of the people are illiterate about the use of the technology, we’ve seen those societies before.

Audrey Tang: We see fire burn through the entire cities because of the limited control of a technology. People generally don’t know how to manage that technology by themselves. What we say about democratic in terms of learning to cook very early on, learning civics very early on, and also learning code very early on, it’s just to build a different shape of expertise.

Audrey Tang: People at any time, if they feel comfortable, can always ask somebody higher on the expertise chain for more input. There will be always a fluid conversation between people who know about the legal issues a little bit more, like the paralegal people, but not yet lawmakers or constitutional court judges.

Audrey Tang: When the constitutional court, for example, makes a interpretation, you see a flow on the Internet where it gets translated into something that the practicing lawyers will understand, that the people with some paralegal training will understand, and then into what just people with liberal arts education will understand, and so on.

Audrey Tang: If anyone, at any point, have some ideas of how to contribute to it, of course, we see a lot of these materials also getting translated back. These kind of feedback and feed-forward, the two-way translation among expertise, is really what keeps any technology, including fire, legal code, and computer code, from being completely dominating.

Audrey Tang: Without this dynamic two-way translation, it’s almost guaranteed to be a surveillance and/or control technology. I do agree with your premise, but this is what everybody can just identify your position, any expertise, and just form communities that basically build a ladder of expertise together.

Paul B. Preciado: I guess that one of the issues is to be able to recognize the technology as a technology. Sometimes, we’re not able to act politically or to have any kind of agency just because we naturalize a technology. We don’t see it as a code, as a language, as something that can be intervened into.

Paul B. Preciado: This is what happens mostly, for instance, with gender, sex, and sexuality. People have this naturalized relation to it, and they think that, in relation to gender, there are just two genders or two sexes, and that these cannot be changed.

Paul B. Preciado: What some of us are doing very much as hackers on the level of writing the code, is understanding gender, sexuality, and sex as political technologies, and, therefore, trying to intervene within those technologies, so have agency on the technologies that are producing your subjectivity.

Paul B. Preciado: This is something that I’ve been call opening up the pill, which I think is quite close to some of the things that you’re doing, but in my case, my work is more related to biotechnologies, chemical technologies, and so on, technologies of production of the body.

Paul B. Preciado: This expression of "opening up the pill" comes from the ’90s when HIV patients were not given the choice of being or not the object of medical trials. They didn’t have the choice of knowing what pill they were talking. Basically, what happened is that, depending on which pill you would be taking, if you are an HIV-positive person, some of them would be dying. Some of them will not die.

Paul B. Preciado: What happened is that, among themselves, and this is very close to this kind of cooperation that you are promoting, they came together and they said, "We need to open up the pill. We need to break up the pill and get to understand the technologies that we are eating, that we’re digesting, in order to be able to know if we will die or we will live."

Paul B. Preciado: They started talking about opening up the pill. For me, this is very close to the idea of hacking the bio-code, not just the code in terms of the Internet. Part of the work that I’m doing is also very much related to your work, is trying to resituate the body within this transformation of media technologies, visual technologies, Internet technologies.

Paul B. Preciado: Opening up the pill, meaning that each of us would have to, at a certain point, ask the question, "What are the technologies that I am using and that are constituting me as a subject," whatever they are, "that allow me to be female or male or heterosexual or not.

Paul B. Preciado: Maybe at some point, we can show one of the images that I brought for you so you understand...Yes, there.

Audrey Tang: You can choose.

Paul B. Preciado: Yeah, if they are here. Maybe just to show this image that has a lot to do with the work that Shu Lea is doing for the pavilion.

Paul B. Preciado: This is one image of the panopticon, which is an architecture from the early 18th century that was thought at the beginning, before being used for prison, to maximize the production of workers in a factory, with the idea that having a central tower from which someone was supposed to be watching everyone working.

Paul B. Preciado: Basically, all the workers would feel the pressure of being watched and suddenly would start working much more and much better. This idea was then used by Jeremy Bentham to promote the construction within European governments, but not only European.

Paul B. Preciado: Recently, we’ve been visiting a prison like that in the mid-south of Taiwan that was constructed during the Japanese occupation. These became a model of control and maximizing of the production within not just European, but also globally, disciplinary institutions. What is interesting...

Paul B. Preciado: That’s nice, too. I never seen this image with your writing before. This already quite a hacking. You see the central structure. This is the prison of Chiaya that is here in Taiwan and that now is a museum, but that was constructed during the Japanese occupation. You can see. It’s not exactly a full panopticon, but the model is quite close to a panopticon.

Paul B. Preciado: Exactly. You see the structure, but what is interesting is that in an architecture like this, your subject position, your possibilities of action are defined by the location that you have within this architecture. In a sense, those architectures of power work as exoskeletons, like in a structure is really like a frame that constrains the body physically.

Paul B. Preciado: Depending on your position, you have a different agency. It’s very clear now, for instance, you’re there. We are here. Someone is holding the iPad. I have the mic. For instance, something that is happening today when we’re saying you can send messages to the Slido is that, in a sense, we’re distributing agency by expanding the technologies for you to modify the relationship that you have to us.

Paul B. Preciado: Within the disciplinary society, within the 19 and early 20th century, basically the position that you have as subject was defined by your exact location within a physical architecture. If you’re a student, you’re sitting down on one of these chairs. If you are the professor, you are here.

Paul B. Preciado: This defines not just a relation of knowledge, that I can give you knowledge and you can give me nothing, but also defines a relation of power. Something is changing. Suddenly, we go from already the abstract eye of the panopticon where this is an abstraction in the sense that the people that are in the cells or working in the factory don’t really know if there is anyone watching them.

Paul B. Preciado: They think there might be someone. Already the eye that is looking is an abstraction. A step farther will happen when suddenly the eye is not human, that the eye is an electronic eye. Therefore, this eye can be fully disseminated within a space.

Paul B. Preciado: Even, the eye can be in your pocket. Suddenly, you don’t have only two eyes, you have many more. Some of them are looking at you. Some of them are your own electronic eyes looking at others.

Paul B. Preciado: There is a multiplication of the eye, a becoming machine of the eye which complicates this relationship of power. I can tell you more about that. What is interesting for me is that something very similar was happening within the domain of the production of gender and sexuality after the Second World War.

Paul B. Preciado: What is going to happen is that, precisely because of the development of a lot of new technologies during the war, some of these technologies will be used for the control of techniques of reproduction. This is exactly what will happen with Pincus and Rock, which are two doctors that, in the late ’40s, actually, invented the contraception pill.

Paul B. Preciado: The contraception pill, at the beginning, they were just pills that came into a bottle. No one really knew how to use them. They had to invent the dispenser. The dispenser had this shape. It can also have this one that is more common now.

Paul B. Preciado: Then, for you to start thinking differently and to look at the technologies that you use differently, I’d like to point to this analogy between the Panopticon and the pill dispenser. There, you see the translation from an architecture of power that is external to the body to a new miniaturized chemical technology that, now, enters within your body and transforms your possibility of action.

Paul B. Preciado: Meaning, for instance, your possibility of being pregnant or not, having or not having, or becoming reproductive or not after a sexual practice, which, fully changes the traditional notion of heterosexuality.

Paul B. Preciado: For instance, I don’t know if you consider yourself heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, polysexual, multisexual, pansexual, asexual. Think that many of those notions are historical, were invented by medical discourses, and are mediated by technologies. As much as language is coded by technology and as the Internet is a technology.

Paul B. Preciado: One of the things that I wanted to point to today and that I thought was interesting about this conversation between us is that you see the relationship between the advent of the Internet at a certain point and the transformation of medical and biotechnologies in the production of subjectivity.

Paul B. Preciado: We always think, "OK, this is technological but the body is not." Yes, the body that we have now, the notion of the contemporary body has to change, cannot be anymore this anatomic fiction from the 15th Century that we keep using. Yes, but I don’t know how do you like to interact with that.

Audrey Tang: Maybe Shu Lea would like to intervene.

Shu Lea Cheang: Actually, not so much. I wouldn’t pause here because... Sorry.

Shu Lea Cheang: Somehow, in refer to this question, "what will be your ideas for the exhibition next year? how will you do it?" We are exactly talking about how we are going to do it next year. [laughs]

Shu Lea Cheang: To our conversation which is going places quite a lot. I want to do a bit of summing up where we are at. The question about technology, in a more common sense, we seem to always refer technology as more technical technology, electronic, mechanical, it seems.

Shu Lea Cheang: At the moment, the way we are talking about technology is pretty much refer to any kind of almost intervention technology, in terms of gender intervention, medical intervention, body intervention.

Shu Lea Cheang: This is quite an interesting area, will be the main threat for the Venice Biennale exhibition we are working on. The other question is the question of the binary. I think the word binary/nonbinary will keep coming up. Again, we would refer to what is the binary technology.

Shu Lea Cheang: As soon as we’re speaking about technology by the way mechanical, electronic equipment is designed -- you have the male and female -- this is the part it drive me crazy. All the time working with technologies, it seems I am working always with the male and female. The female needs to find a male to plug in the male/female plugging thing, and then, finally, you have to find an adapter.

Shu Lea Cheang: This seems to be the journey of my technical [laughs] journey. Actually, if we start talking about the technology in the sense of the binary male and female, then we should, again, redefine what would be able to break down the body binary of male and female. This is another topic that we would be dealing with in a certain way in the exhibition.

Shu Lea Cheang: Consider this, and I think somehow we will get into this binary/nonbinary and how we would redefine ourself. Earlier on, there’s also a question about how do we queer the museum. What would the structure of the museum if here we are in a grand museum? What would the artist do within the system? What would be the intervention in the museum system, including, "How do we queer the museum in that sense?"

Shu Lea Cheang: Second topic I feel like you both touch on is actually about the architecture. Paul, your question with architecture is always really more refer to the power of the space, isn’t it? All the time, you refer back to how do we switch, shifting this power relationship in certain way, how we position ourselves, not only the space, the seating, the left to right or the right to left, the top and up.

Shu Lea Cheang: In this case, we can easily get into sexual positioning, I guess.

Shu Lea Cheang: Which would be quite exciting in the Tuesday afternoon before six o’clock.

Shu Lea Cheang: Of course, I think the confined architecture space. In this way, I would like to refer to the question earlier, a question about the title "3x3x6." The title 3x3x6 refer to a prison cell that is 9-square meter and six surveillance camera. It is a certain kind of prison cell in Europe.

Shu Lea Cheang: Actually, in Chiayi Prison, we see even smaller cells. This kind of 9-square-meter, six-surveillance-camera cell is actually designed to break down any prisoner’s spirit. It’s meant to break you. You’ll lose it, you’ll definitely lose it within this kind of confined space.

Shu Lea Cheang: I think we talk about, in France, for example, a lot of terrorists or suspects of terrorist will be incarcerated in this kind of cell. However, the title 3x3x6 actually taking these prison cell as more of a symbolic space and to expand it into the current surveillance system that we live in.

Shu Lea Cheang: Consider China’s 20 million facial recognition surveillance camera in every street corner for its land. When Paul start talking about panopticon, the 17th century of Bentham, today I will refer to the panopticon as a data panopticon.

Shu Lea Cheang: The whole surveillance system with the camera catching us, our data being captured, send in to big data, I think we are all part of bigger panopticon that is really hard to escape or hard to seek another space. In this sense, I really want to maybe stop here and let you continue then. I didn’t finish any sentence, did I?

Paul B. Preciado: You asked many questions. Exactly, many different questions. I don’t know, maybe you want to say something about the code. This is quite fascinating to think about the possibility of going beyond binary code. I can talk about the binary regime in gender and sexuality, but I want you to talk about the...

Audrey Tang: I’ll just make one intervention which is, should we talk about always having to find adaptors? That is really true. This old technology called Apple Pencil, it is really symbolic. The only way to charge it is to plug it into the iPad. It looks really gender symbolic.

Audrey Tang: Now, with the latest generation of Apple Pencil, it no longer works that way. If I may, I can bring out the Apple Pencil. It just attaches itself to the side of the iPad. It’s now magnetic and wireless. What I’m saying is that there are different ways to configure the connections. The old way of binary pairing, basically, assumes a one-on-one relationship.

Audrey Tang: A one-on-one relationship was there because it’s easier to reason about. It’s easier to program for. It’s easier to code for, basically. Whereas, if you have a WiFi, or a Bluetooth, or a 5G connection there may be any number of devices in the same space. You have to have a lot of software to make the case of why this is more efficient than the old way.

Audrey Tang: I will bring in something very technical. In the old way of Internet protocol, which we’re using right now, it’s called IPv4. You know it’s version 4 when you know it’s four digits, 101.101.101.101, which is a real Internet address, by the way. People, generally, find these numbers are limited in numbering. Each number become more and more expensive.

Audrey Tang: The Internet community decide to open up the space of Internet devices from V4 to V6. Now you have more spaces than you can have in the number of stars in the universe, perhaps. Now it doesn’t cost anything to have an Internet address. Taiwan has been really growing in adoption of IPv6. IPv6 bring a very interesting technology called the multicast.

Audrey Tang: In the old, bad way of Internet, the only way for 50 people to connect to one another is to, essentially, form a hub-and-spoke structure where 50 people connect to the same server. A server redistributes their conversations to one another. Each one has a binary relationship.

Audrey Tang: There is the server and the client, which is also kind of sexual in connotation... In any case, that was the old way of, what we call, a singlecast. Now, with multicast, it can be configured in IPv6 in any which way like this. This forms, what we call, a, interestingly, promiscuous -- which is a technical term, I promise you -- a promiscuous configuration where people relate, like gossips, what they hear from each other.

Audrey Tang: It enables a much higher quality conversation by having everybody be, at once, the receiver and also the distributor. This multicast, non-binary relationship is within the Internet protocol that we’re now transitioning into as we speak. Taiwan, actually, has the fastest-growing adoption of IPv6.

Audrey Tang: As basic, as essential as the Internet protocol itself, there is a re-imagination from a more binary, and limited, and scarce resource thought pattern into a more abundant. Everybody can get any number you think of. They all promiscuously connect together in a multicast way. That’s the only intervention I would like to add.

Shu Lea Cheang: Congratulation. It’s only one hour has passed. We finally bring Internet and sex together.

Paul B. Preciado: Just saying, while I was listening to you I thought, "Oh, something very similar is happening within the discussion in terms of gender and sexuality."

Paul B. Preciado: We could read all the fights that have been happening from, let’s say, the late 19th Century in terms of feminism, the homosexual movement, then the gay and lesbian and trans movement, and the queer movement, and so on. We could read all these fights in terms precisely of modifying the epistemology of gender and sexuality.

Paul B. Preciado: To go back into this way of reading history as science fiction, in the sense... When I say this is because basically my experience when reading history of sexuality is that we know so very little of our own history of sexuality. When you read something from the 17th century you might think, "OK, this is like, this is gonna be either the future, or is completely insane."

Paul B. Preciado: It’s quite interesting to almost learn to think about history differently. I may be, also, once we re- appropriate critically this history...This is almost a moment of cognitive emancipation. If you suddenly say, "Wow. Things were not the same way, and therefore they can change. They can transform as the code is constantly being transformed and in discussion."

Paul B. Preciado: The gender binary system that we have is quite recent. It didn’t exist until the 17th century. Before...At least, I am speaking now about Europe and the West. What we had was a regime with just one sex, the male sex. The female sex didn’t really exist other than just a completely degenerated variation of masculinity.

Paul B. Preciado: We could see all the fights within feminism as a way precisely of writing in the code, a way of saying, "We need to modify this epistemology, to be able to write difference in." What is going to happen is that along the 17th and 18th century, what we will have is precisely the invention of the model, this epistemology, let’s say a representation regime, a diagram of knowledge in which things can be represented with two sexes.

Paul B. Preciado: This is quite recent, but we’re still fighting with that. These two sexes, meaning that you can only be male or female. There’s a huge epistemological crisis happening in the 40s exactly at the time that the Second World War is taking place, exactly at the time that many of the anti-colonial movements are started to grow within the world as well.

Paul B. Preciado: Exactly at that point, the medical sciences, but also many of the movements, they realize that many bodies cannot, of human beings, I say that because not all the bodies are immediately human, many bodies cannot be assigned either female or male gender when they’re being born. Therefore, they have to be interbeing.

Paul B. Preciado: They have to be either operated, hormones have to be administrated to them, and this is the moment of the invention of the modern notion of gender and the invention of what we call the John Money protocol, which in a sense is, more or less, I could say is a software in terms of gender that it’s amazing that we keep using this software when we should be rewriting this code constantly.

Paul B. Preciado: That’s what we’re trying to do within the movements. For instance, I would say that the work that Shu Lea Cheng is doing is in a sense experimenting with the aesthetics of gender and sexuality, producing an enormous amount of new grammars, of new codings, some of which will not be fully inscribed within reality.

Paul B. Preciado: Some of them remain within fiction, but it’s important to have those fictions to be able to imagine political change. The first and most difficult thing to do is to change the way you’re thinking. This is the most difficult thing to do.

Paul B. Preciado: This is what artists will be helping us doing. What we see now is a strong fight precisely for opening up the binary code within gender and sexuality and maybe something like quite similar to what you were saying before, Audrey, in terms of the IPB six, so something like that that could look like an n+1 genders.

Paul B. Preciado: Not just female or male, but any gender, and therefore, maybe avoiding completely to be assigned to female or male gender when you’re being born. Erase fully, completely, therefore, multiply up to infinity the amount of genders that we could have.

Shu Lea Cheang: This question’s just come up. Audrey, can you read it and translate it?

Audrey Tang: It disappeared. OK. I think that laptop went to sleep.

Audrey Tang: We’ll give it some time while I go ahead with the plan B, which is to bring it up here...

Shu Lea Cheang: I’m not sure.

Paul B. Preciado: Better.

Shu Lea Cheang: Actually, I think in a sense when I say I know, Audrey, I think you are still — always — a hacktivist. In a sense of hacktivism or hacker of technology or computer codes or hacker as a sex and gender and body. When we are talking about hacking, we’re not limited to computer codes anymore. Refer to this particular question about...Would you like to pick up from?

Audrey Tang: Yes, the question reads, about gender hacking, this discussion falls into the category of post-human or post-humanity. The questioner, which is anonymous, says that it seems to connotate the notion of seeing the subjectivity model as a information modal instead of a material model. It coincides with the idea that consciousness itself is a epiphenomena -- it’s not just phenomena, it’s epiphenomena, it’s something out of the phenomenal world -- or whether it is a new noble in evolution.

Audrey Tang: They would like to ask about the relationship between information and body: Does it actually mean that subjectivity is purely information, or is it also somewhat body, or body is purely information? What does that even mean?

Audrey Tang: Would Paul like to take on this?

Paul B. Preciado: I guess that what is changing is what we understand by what a body is. I’m shifting the notion of the body and trying to move to this place, this notion and use the notion of somatic. It’s mostly in French when we speak about a bibliothèque to say a library, for instance. Basically, a huge collection, for me, a body is a living archive.

Paul B. Preciado: Within this living archive, there are carbon components and there are silicone components. The body’s not just organic. The body is made out of many different technological and organic components. Some of them are information-based. For instance, what is a body without language?

Paul B. Preciado: Maybe a body that has no language at all -- I do not refer to oral speaking but to language -- might not be able to be considered part of the human species, not be able to be welcome within a society. What is human is constantly being discussed. What is human is not just defined by nature.

Paul B. Preciado: Even this difference between humanity and animality, between what is alive and what is not alive is also an object of constant political debate. This is constantly being discussed. Just to mention that you can go and see the post-nature exhibition upstairs. That, precisely, is dealing with this issue and this topic.

Paul B. Preciado: What I don’t like so much when we immediately go into the post-human debate is that it seems that we’re just within the kingdom of just machines. There is no agency. Unfortunately, I would say that machines are our sons, our offsprings.

Paul B. Preciado: This is one of the things that we’re living with. We’re now in a kingdom where there are already also machines with us. This is not just only machines. Therefore, even machines will have agency and political agency as well. As you know, for instance, now, I don’t know how it’s here.

Paul B. Preciado: The European community has been recently discussing if robots can be considered legal people, legal persons. I don’t know if this debate is taking place here, but I’m sure even more than in Europe.

Paul B. Preciado: With the paradoxical side that at the same time that the European community is discussing this, the same European community is refusing the entrance within the European community of hundreds of thousands of refugees, therefore human, organic, and so on [laughs] that are trying to cross the Mediterranean because of the war among other things on Syria but also because of economic and work conditions in Africa.

Paul B. Preciado: What we could say is that what are the conditions for a certain body being a body, organic or non-organic, to be recognized as human and therefore to belong to a human social community, this is a huge political debate and has to be.

Paul B. Preciado: For me, one of the things that I see your work, for instance, is activating this debate and being able to bring more people within that debate, including machines, including the Internet of Things.

Paul B. Preciado: What I would be cautious about is precisely going into this very dystopic way of thinking, "Oh, we are in the post-human, and therefore, we’ve done away with any kind of political agency. We have to..."

Paul B. Preciado: I don’t know exactly what, but maybe wait for what is happening today as well, that we arrive in Mars and that’s it. A recolonizing the world with the post-human being, something.

Audrey Tang: There’s something new that Shu Lea has highlighted. It’s from AM0336, which is a very interesting name to have that has more cybernetic nature, I would say. It says, "Art must constantly intervene in politics until politics stops interfering with art." What’s my view on this statement?

Audrey Tang: As a poetician, my [laughs] main work in politics is to write poems. For me, the intervention of art in politics, I think, must not stop even when politics stops interfering with art. Art need to become politics. When Paul talk about Internet of Things, I was reminded of a poem that I wrote when I was appointed Digital Minister two years ago.

Audrey Tang: It begins with the idea of Internet of Things, because it was very popular back then. I think it contributes to a discussion that is not healthy. When we talk about Internet of Things, we’re implicitly saying, "There’s things and there’s humans. Humans use the Internet now, but things will use the Internet in the future."

Audrey Tang: It’s a very post-human kind of discourse and also very binary. I wrote a poem to kind of dissolve that binary, and it’s my job description actually as the Taiwan Digital Minister. It goes like this.

Audrey Tang: When we see Internet of things, let’s make it an Internet of beings.

Audrey Tang: When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.

Audrey Tang: When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning.

Audrey Tang: When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience.

Audrey Tang: And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember that a plurality is here.

Audrey Tang: This is a poetic take on politics and especially the politics of the Internet of things as Paul just described. That’s my answer to this question. I don’t know whether Paul has something to contribute?

Paul B. Preciado: I don’t know if we mean this question maybe bring us back to the question of how to queer the museum that you mentioned before, Shu Lea? In the sense of for me, like asking the question of art and politics in such a abstract way, for me, doesn’t make any sense. This, for me, it’s just like what art, what politics? Of which context are we speaking about?

Paul B. Preciado: Art and politics are never separated. Basically, art is always political, right. It can be a bit normative, conservative or it can be very critical, but there is always or it can, in a sense, it can repeat the normative aesthetics, or it can be suddenly like troubling that aesthetics or complicating it or just like introducing some variations within the code.

Paul B. Preciado: It’s not possible that any kind of art will be like completely outside of politics even if it’s just like a beautiful, could be beautiful painting, but beautiful painting is painting according to the canon, and therefore, like reproducing a certain code.

Paul B. Preciado: Anyway, but that’s why instead of posing the question as such an abstract level, it’s easier for us to maybe think if we want to think about like, "OK, can we make the museum more queer, or can we queer the museum, or can we de-patriarchalize the museum, or decolonize the museum?"

Paul B. Preciado: I think that there are several strategies that have been tried out in different places. One of the strategies, that for me has become problematic at a certain point, is the strategy of identity politics and representation which is, basically, saying like, "OK, for a museum to be more feminist, let’s have more women being exhibited."

Paul B. Preciado: For a museum to be more queer, "Oh, let’s have more homosexual artists being exhibited." For a museum to be more decolonial, "Oh, let’s have more indigenous artists to be exhibited." I think that this strategy for me is still problematic in the sense that it contributes to naturalize what we understand for men and women, indigenous and non-indigenous, heterosexual and homosexual.

Paul B. Preciado: I think that the challenge that we’re facing today, as curators or working within the institution, is precisely to change the epistemology of the museum. Can we open the code of the museum? Can we radically say instead of, "Oh, let’s make a feminist exhibition and let’s invite suddenly 20 women." It’s like, "Hello, but do you think that with 20 women, the horrifying patriarchal idea of art that we already have will change? No."

Paul B. Preciado: Maybe it’s not just about inviting men or women or homosexuals or heterosexuals. This is ridiculous. This is buying into the identity politics.

Paul B. Preciado: What would be challenging is trying to think collectively and therefore giving more access to the technologies of knowledge production and the technologies of artmaking to all of us to question what we understand for, let’s say, male, female, heterosexual or homosexual, and therefore go beyond those dichotomies.

Paul B. Preciado: This is what I think that the museum can become a radical democratic place. It might be one of the few spaces today in which all of us...

Paul B. Preciado: For instance, if you go to the university or to the school, you’re supposed to be there to get a credit at the end. You go and you say, "I want to do industrial design." You better learn how to do it. [laughs] If you don’t do it well, then you don’t get your credit.

Paul B. Preciado: When you come to the museum, you don’t know what you’re coming for. I think this is the good thing about it, that we don’t come for anything. We come to ask questions, to criticize, to change the way we see the world and to do it with fiction and with poetry.

Paul B. Preciado: Therefore, to breaking up the code and maybe collectively inventing other codes that go beyond this binary. I think that this is for me a different way of looking at the museum that being more inclusive and bringing the minorities is completely a different way of saying let’s radically transform the epistemology of the museum.

Shu Lea Cheang: This is probably a very good point for me to break into this question. I think if we, again, going back to the space and shifting the space, and so, the question will be in this case, how do we queer a country?

Audrey Tang: For context for Paul, we had a national referenda, five of which about gender and sexuality and marriage equality and everything. The outcome of the referendum is that people generally, and when I say, "people," I mean people who went to vote.

Audrey Tang: People who went to vote, generally, I mean over majority, wanted a legal protection of their right of so-called same-sex union. Don’t call it marriage in the civil code. Call it something else like gay marriage or whatever, in some other part of the law system outside of the civil code.

Audrey Tang: It will, of course, provide the same level of protection except for the name. That was the outcome of the referenda. The question asks, in this moment of backlash, should we, perhaps, re-understand the idea of a post-house, post-family, post-marriage ideas?

Audrey Tang: These ideas were discarded during the referenda movement which focused on full marriage equality. Perhaps we should think more about companionship, thinking about a family consist of multiple partners and the other ideas.

Audrey Tang: Maybe, in this referenda outcome, which is binding, that we will have a separate legal code for so-called same-sex marriage. Maybe we can bring up those new ideas of pluralistic unions. What do you think about it?

Paul B. Preciado: Big question. I think that this is an excellent idea. I don’t think it should be like a plan B. It seems like a consolation prize. Like, "Oh, we didn’t won the election. So, let’s go for plurality." I would say it’s a little bit the same discussion that I was trying to evoke when speaking about a museum.

Paul B. Preciado: There are two different strategies. One that I would call liberal democracy, to come back to a more common way of speaking about politics. Liberal democracy in which you assume that everyone is equal in front of the law. From that point on, you say, "Men, women, heterosexuals, homosexuals..."

Paul B. Preciado: Transsexuals is always a problem, but anyway. Like, "Well, transsexuals, you as well, you’re just there." [laughs] "Well, yes, stay there. Don’t say much." You have all these people that are asking to be included and recognized by the law.

Paul B. Preciado: They’re asking having access to the same institutions and the same legal norms than the other ones, right? The problem is that, first -- this is going to sound too harsh -- first we are asking for recognition to a state that, normally, is an agent of violence. It’s very difficult to ask for recognition.

Paul B. Preciado: I don’t think we should be asking for recognition. I think we should be very critical, or even it’s like why are we asking for permission to get married, even if marriage is a patriarchal institution that has to do precisely with a restriction of freedom of women historically?

Paul B. Preciado: Why do we have to ask for this right? I guess that instead of getting entangled within the whole debate of asking the state for permission to get married or to get a civil union, we should start thinking about how becoming a citizen of the world is changing today.

Paul B. Preciado: In which conditions, who is allowed to be a citizen of this world in which some of us are allowed to travel with a passport and have certain conditions and privileges and the rest of the world, which is the majority of the world, have right to nothing mostly? I think it’s a question of radical justice that has to be asked here, not so much asking for permission to the state.

Paul B. Preciado: Therefore maybe at least from the point of view of gender and sexuality, I guess that and from experience we have in Europe or in the US in some of the places where they have acquired the right to, let’s say, homosexual marriage, for instance, or civil unions, what we realize is that one of the reasons that this particular law is being used is to have access to live in a particular country, to become citizen of a country.

Paul B. Preciado: I think this is a major question. It’s having access, the issue of migration today, is much more important than the issue of marriage. This should be at the core of any political discussion rather than marriage.

Paul B. Preciado: This is one thing. Second thing, as I said before, the debate today within radical gender and queer movements is to get rid of gender assignation at birth. Therefore, if you think it well, if you do not have a paper that says that you’re a man or a woman, then no one has to give you permission to marry someone else, because there will be no heterosexual and no homosexual marriage.

Paul B. Preciado: It’s important for us to think that those notions, heterosexuality and homosexuality that we keep using as they are like rocks, they seem to be that they were in history forever. They’re medical categories that were invented within the 19th century, let alone that have nothing to do with the Chinese tradition. [laughs]

Paul B. Preciado: That is a whole different discussion. We could also get into that discussion. It’s like why are we discussing with these notions that in a sense were colonial, so had nothing to do with the way of understanding sexuality within, let’s say, oriental culture and at the beginning, right.

Paul B. Preciado: I think that what is interesting for me is sometimes to change the terms of the debate, because otherwise, it seems that within the movements, we keep saying like, "Oh, we have to get the equality right to, like equal rights for marriage."

Paul B. Preciado: This is like if this will structure all fights within the movement, and then we lose so much time when the actual questions today are like much more about accessing technologies. Of course, marriage is an institution and therefore is a technology, but is it the technology that we really want to construct ourselves today? Hm, maybe not.

Paul B. Preciado: How useful is this technology compared let’s say, for instance, to coding or programming now? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’ll say something about citizenry access. In Taiwan, many of us, I think most of us here have something what we call the National ID. Everyone has a National ID that maybe look like A, I don’t know, 2235 something, something, something.

Audrey Tang: People of a foreign passport, even if they have permanent resident certificate, maybe, they have been like spending all their life in Taiwan, they have a something like AC23 something, something. They have a different class of an identification number.

Audrey Tang: They’re prevented, actually, access that shouldn’t be excluded, but are excluded because of code. If people go to order a movie ticket, or if they order some meals online, or maybe they buy a train ticket from the train station and use the Chinese, not the English interface of the website, they will be asked to fill in a National ID.

Audrey Tang: Where they put in AC223 something, it will be rejected, saying, "It is not a valid National ID because the second digit is not a digit. It is a alphabet." Because of that, they’re denied access that by law and by regulation, actually, should be provided to permanent residents, but is rejected simply because the letter don’t look like a digit, which is very much in tune of this citizenry access.

Audrey Tang: Of course, starting next year, we’re going to change that. The number here is going to be changed. The AC something, something, it will be replaced by a 9 something, something. Basically, the numbers seven, eight and nine will be used in place of the letters C and so on, AC and so on.

Audrey Tang: That is a change in the design of the code, not the legal code, just computer code, just the numbering system to provide more inclusive access of visitors, permanent residents and everybody in between, who don’t hold a local passport, to still have access to local services.

Audrey Tang: That brings a interesting thing because there’s many countries with passport of a non-binary gender now. We, traditionally, use the second digit to distinguish between the genders.

Audrey Tang: What do we do of foreign nationals when they become getting this new numbers that are non-binary? Do we force them to choose eight or nine or do we roll a dice or something? The result is that we make the number seven the non-binary digit.

Audrey Tang: If you choose to be a non-binary in your home country, if your passport says you’re non-binary, then here you’re also non-binary. Our entire computer code system has to be rewritten to recognize the potentiality of a non-binary gender. I’m saying this purely on a code level. This is not a law-level thing.

Paul B. Preciado: I think this is super interesting. This shows that, instead of fighting for gay marriage, for instance, we could be fighting to change administration codes. Basically, deleting certain codes or modifying them, or being able to rewrite other codes. This is a completely different discussion than just fighting for marriage.

Shu Lea Cheang: We’re quite aware of the frustration up to the election, particularly with the vote in the referendum with totally public participation who voted no to the same-sex marriage. However, as Paul mentioned, we really do have to question all the system that, what are we fighting for? What are we fighting against?

Shu Lea Cheang: It seems like we are so much driven by certain cooperative actions that we want to get into the discussion about what is the cooperation action? In that sense, what would the solidarity alliance be?

Shu Lea Cheang: Rather than fighting for the name of marriage or the couple or that, what would be a bigger or a different, alternative agenda that we can get into without confine ourself into finding our space in society or the norm?

Paul B. Preciado: I guess that has to do with leaving behind or going beyond identity politics. Which is, if you organize your fights according to identity politics, then women are supposed to be fighting for feminism. Gay people, whatever they are, they are supposed to be fighting for gay rights, trans, and so on and so forth.

Paul B. Preciado: Then, if you can do the same within nationalist language, you can also be fighting for this or that nation for this or that identity. If you go beyond that identity framework, then you have to start constructing, what I call, synthetic alliances, alliances that are not based on natural identity.

Paul B. Preciado: We are precisely questioning natural identity, that identity is natural. Identity is always culturally and politically constructed. Those alliances cannot be based on identity. What is a woman is still a full discussion. What is a man is still a full discussion, let alone what is to be Taiwanese or Chinese? I’m not going to get into that.

Paul B. Preciado: Those are big questions that cannot be answered immediately and through a natural set of empirical elements. All of them have to be the object of a critical debate, have to be open for fictional and political imagination.

Shu Lea Cheang: Unavoidable, the question of the technological utopianism was mentioned here in a question. I guess this is another good topic to get into, isn’t it, utopia? In my work, I swing between being called my work is utopian or dystopian. In a certain way, we all swing in between these two state of mind or states. Audrey?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I have been called an imagineer, I think imagineering is a real word, when I worked on a new computer language.

Audrey Tang: The computer language try to bring together different paradigms of programmers thinking about a world of the functional paradigm, of thinking the world as mathematics; or the object-oriented paradigm where people think of the world as objects interacting with each other; or the imperative, where people think of machines as subjects to obey a command and logical and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s many different world views. Back when we were doing the Perl 6 language, which now has a name called Raku, or in Japanese, I think it’s just happiness. The Raku language is now done in the sense that it’s a stable language that’s running in computers.

Audrey Tang: It enables people who view the world through a particular lens to nevertheless compose something that can be understood and interacted with by people who view the world with a different lens. That was considered impossible or at least extremely difficult 10 years ago. We did that anyway. When we did that, it’s called imagineering.

Audrey Tang: To that question, I would simply want to show this 17 colors that I’m wearing on my shirt all the time. These are what the United Nations call the sustainable development goals, or the SDGs.

Audrey Tang: To many people indeed, I would also make the case that even the SDGs itself that we need by year 2030 get to the point of there’s no poverty, where there’s education for everyone, where there’s access to justice and things like that and climate change and affordable energy and so on is utopian.

Audrey Tang: I will not deny that. What they did, the UNDP did, is that around 2012 or so, they started planning a questionnaire to ask more than one million people in the world what is the future you want to see in the year 2030? There’s one million voices. Their report is literally called, "A Million Voices."

Audrey Tang: They collected all those wishes and merged them into 169 targets and say, "If we reach these targets by 2030, then everybody seems like it’s the world they want." They make it such that if you work on any of those targets, it will not harm people working on any other targets. It’s self-reinforcing.

Audrey Tang: Philosophy itself, I admit it is utopian to think that people working on economic growth, people working on environmental protection and working on social progress can somehow magically reinforce each other’s work. Of course, that is utopian thought.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, it is what Immanuel Kant would say a regulative thought or a regulative concept in the sense that if we are to proceed as a unity, we have to hold certain patterns of thoughts in mind. It’s not that they’re constitutive, meaning that we can’t actually do anything with them.

Audrey Tang: They are just goals. They don’t say how to reach those goals. If we don’t keep these in mind, the unity itself and the very possibility of breaking apart from the prisons that is the individual sectors and individual movements become impossible.

Audrey Tang: Once we hold the image of, for example, as digital minister, I hold the image of the 17.18 of enhancing availability of reliable data. I hold the image of 17.17, of encouraging effective cross-sectoral partnerships, and 17.6, which is if we make an innovation, we don’t colonize other place in Earth with it.

Audrey Tang: We open it up to share with everyone. Of course, we don’t do 100 percent on any of this, but every day, we make a little bit more contribution toward these goals. These are regulative in nature. I would say, of course, the formation, the imagi- of imagination is utopian.

Audrey Tang: The -nation of imagination, it is everyday action. That is cooperative, to answer Shu Lea’s question, is to hold similar thought patterns constitutive in mind but then do actions that are within the spirit of the constitution, but not the regulative idea -- which are really just ideas -- you can’t do anything about them. It is like the old Kantian model of regulative ideas.

Paul B. Preciado: For once, even though, as I said the other day, I used to be a pathological utopist or utopian. For once, I think I’m going to play the other side. You have to apologize, maybe because I don’t know well enough the context here as to really be able to discuss the issues that are probably worrying you here in the audience.

Paul B. Preciado: What I can tell you is that, in the West, we are going through a double moment of, on one side, revolution. I would say that, yes, there is a revolution going on. That revolution not only happened in, let’s say, the 1960s as we traditionally think.

Paul B. Preciado: Also, happening now in all the underground, sub-alter movements that are fighting precisely to have access to the technologies of government, to the technologies of knowledge production, to the technologies of inscription. Yes, this is a revolution happening today.

Paul B. Preciado: You see it also here but all around the world in terms of feminism, the sexual minorities, the colonized that are in a whole process of decolonization. This is happening. At the same time, there is also a counter-reform going on with a full movement towards much more conservative thinking, even, at least in the West, and Europe, and in the US, neo-fascist thinking.

Paul B. Preciado: Extremely nationalist and extremely based on ideas of identity, blood, soil, territory. Even though, totally, I hear you, Audrey, and I would love to share your utopian language. When I see myself, that finishing up poverty in the world is a goal, I would say, "Well, yes." What do we understand by poverty? Is poverty defined in capitalist terms? How is this defined in relation to the market?

Paul B. Preciado: To go back to the discussion that we had today, in the beginning, is that, are we able to think, even, about what is a good life beyond the standards of neo-liberal capitalism? Maybe, I don’t know. At least, to tell you the truth, in the West, my doubts are enormous. Basically, I live between France and Spain but I travel enormously. I can’t be optimistic about the situation, I have to say.

Paul B. Preciado: For me, I would say that we need a new grammar. What health means today is being defined in very normative terms. I’m going to give you a very basic example. If you think about being HIV positive in Taiwan today, this is almost a crime. If you are HIV positive, you have to declare your status to the government.

Paul B. Preciado: Therefore, from that point on, your whole life and sexuality will be the object of surveillance. This is for the public health, in benefit of the public health. What does it mean to keep using the notion of health? The same with poverty, or progress, or advancement, or transparency, those notions, for me, are problematic.

Paul B. Preciado: We need to collectively search for a new grammar to speak even beyond the binary, not only in the sense of the binary male, female, homosexual, heterosexual or even the binary code, but also the east and the west, these notions, the north and the south, do not mean anything anymore. It’s ridiculous that we keep using them.

Paul B. Preciado: Even in the art world today we’ll keep talking about the global south. I’m like, "What is this global south?" The south is everywhere and it’s nowhere. It’s a colonial notion. I refuse to keep talking about the global south as if, for instance, Taiwan would be within the global south and then whatever.

Paul B. Preciado: From that point on, immediately there are a series of consequences of that location, whereas we know that cartographies are also politically constructed.

Paul B. Preciado: I’m saying this because, as much as I want to fully agree with your good sense [laughs] that it is valid to bring Kant within these conversations because of those goals. I want to agree to those good goals with, "Why not?" As much as I want to do that, as a philosopher, and in this sense even a curator, but much more as a philosopher...

Paul B. Preciado: When you’re doing poetry, you can have a moment of just not caring too much.

Audrey Tang: Poetic license.

Paul B. Preciado: Exactly. As a philosopher, you have to take some responsibility.

Paul B. Preciado: You realize that the language that we are using to define what progress will be within the next 30 years, or 20 years if we’re thinking about 2030, has to be critically and extremely quickly revised if we don’t want to promote something that I would call necropolitics, which is buying again into the politics of destruction of the planet and using the human and non-human beings equally for the purpose of production and consumption.

Audrey Tang: I totally agree. Back in 2015 when the Sustainable Goals was first defined as the global goals, one of its so-called pinnacle of a philosophical change is that it stops talking about developing nations and developed nations, which was a huge thing back in the Millennium Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: That is, I think, a genuine grammar change, because it means that no matter where you are, as long as you are on the planet, you want to get there, somewhere, regardless of developed or developing. But I do agree it’s not going far enough.

Audrey Tang: Many part of the SDGs are still defined, for example, in terms of the gross domestic product, which is now widely seen as a bankrupt metric for any kind of progress whatsoever. Post-GDP well-being is actually a large part of the sustainable development discourse.

Audrey Tang: Even, we can problematize this "development" word itself. Why not just sustain? Why development? What’s development for? These things, I do agree that we need to critically examine and re-develop until we don’t just think in terms of development.

Shu Lea Cheang: I don’t know if we have time to break into the question about the freedom. How would you translate/transfer the possibility of virtual freedom in the limited praxis of the modern mundanity of the masses?

Shu Lea Cheang: I do actually have a little doubt about virtual freedom. I do not particularly want to endorse. Virtually, we do have more freedom than in reality. However, maybe this is a good question for us to get back to the title what we set up to do, "Freedom, Art, [laughs] and Democracy."

Audrey Tang: They used...By "they," I mean this person who calls themself, "How would you translate a metaphor?" which is great name, by the way. They used translate/transfer, but that is a very interesting combination because it’s almost never together.

Audrey Tang: If you [laughs] translate, you’re really bringing a copy, maybe a imperfect one, but you’re bringing a copy. If you transfer, it kind of means that the original is gone. It make it to the other end. It’s not a copy, it’s the same thing.

Audrey Tang: I think these represent two different views of freedom. I wouldn’t even talk about virtual. One is that freedom is something that you need to fight for. It is never complete. You can get a translated version, and maybe you open up some possibility and the next generation will have more freedom.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very progressive view, which was true, certainly is true in Taiwan. I still remember the Martial law days when I was a young child. There’s, of course, less freedom, and it’s a objective fact because when people publish something the rulers don’t want to see, they get disappeared.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we can objectively say there was less freedom of assembly, of publishing, of speech, of whatever 30 years before. Compared to now, I think we can say that. It also says the possibility of transfer, which means that it’s got a complete transfer. Once you have this freedom imbued in the flesh, then you completely free up, liberate, emancipates oneself.

Audrey Tang: I think these are two very different takes on freedom that will warrant different pathways into praxis. I don’t even know the freedom they refer to in these two verbs are the same freedoms. Does Paul have something?

Paul B. Preciado: No, I agree with you that freedom is not something that is there as an object that we get, right. It’s like suddenly, OK, we have something that we have to obtain that is freedom.

Paul B. Preciado: I think that freedom has to be invented. We don’t even know what it is to be free. I think that’s the radical problem is that we only know freedom within the limits of a very already constrained set of actions.

Paul B. Preciado: For instance, to go back to the example of transitioning, when I was a child, for myself, I couldn’t even think about gender freedom because there was no framework in which being free in terms of gender could be thought. It was just like a total impossibility.

Paul B. Preciado: I would say that, yes, for me, freedom has to do precisely with the expansion of the possibilities of thinking, change, and transformation much more than with acquired something that we already know what it is.

Paul B. Preciado: Then, what is more worrying me about this question, and sometimes, I wish we could have discussions with how would you translate a metaphor that should be around maybe here, oh you’re there. OK, great.

Audrey Tang: Do we have a spare microphone?

Paul B. Preciado: Yeah. Yeah maybe you can...because I think it’s fantastic to have the interface, for instance, for you to be able to have some inscription on the wall but if you’re here, then you can even more actively talk to us or talk to us...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, please. Is there a spare microphone or should we take Shu Lea’s?

Paul B. Preciado: You have a mic on the seat.

Paul B. Preciado: No, it’s not working.

Audrey Tang: Would you like to...?

Paul B. Preciado: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Maybe you can help holding it.

Paul B. Preciado: Like this.

Audience Member: All right, OK.

Audience Member: First of all, thank you. I think this is the most progressive political and contemporary art interaction I’ve ever seen in my life.

Audience Member: Yeah.

Paul B. Preciado: In your life, maybe not.

Audience Member: Maybe it’s limited, my experience, but this is like really something else. The idea was that my worries about this freedom that I see every day, for example on my Facebook wall because I have a lot of progressive friends and with my discussions with my friends.

Audience Member: Then when I got out, for example, I live in a wider angle or a wider range from my comfort zone, there’s a really different perspective. I love the title. I really like what’s happened over here.

Audience Member: I was wondering if there’s like a methodology or some kind of measures to take all this brilliant content to the masses that actually sometimes when you actually try to talk about...even with these concepts like industrial revolution, cooperative action, they’re like, "what are you talking about?"

Audience Member: When we talk, for example, about social actions and we see, for example, the civil war -- this is an example -- a lot of poets or artists try to put all the stuff that was in the cloud of the progressive movement and put it in the ground, for example, and going to the camp and going to the rural landscape.

Audience Member: What I see here is that in the mutual zones, we’re actually building a little brilliant content. The challenge is to take it forward to the places that light happen is just not there right now. My question is, what did we do about this?

Audrey Tang: I can take the Facebook one. That brings us to a third kind of freedom, right? It’s not just freedom to do something or freedom for some kind of people but also freedom from something, negative freedom. I think that’s the philosophical term. For your Facebook feed, I would like to invite you to try this for a bit.

Audrey Tang: I’ve been working with this plug-in, in both mobile and desktop version, for more than two years now. It’s called, very simply, the Newsfeed Eradicator. It tears down the Facebook wall, so to speak, and replace it with some inspiring quote. In this instance Adler. You can a get different quote every time.

Audrey Tang: What it does is very simple. It takes the wall away and replace it with something inspiring. The effect, very simply, is that it frees you from the algorithm meddling, manufactured addiction, the fear of missing out, and many other mental health hazards.

Audrey Tang: It does keep Facebook in its more intentional part. You can still use it like a blog to post something. You can use it like a search engine. You can search for a hashtag. You can visit your friend’s profile. You can visit a Facebook page. You can watch your live stream. These are all good social functions because you make an action and you see the result happen.

Audrey Tang: The wall is something else. You do nothing and then things that fit your self-image that is done by symbiotic, since you are also playing, a symbiotic relation AI that’s building for you, which is the filter bubble or whatever thing that you’re describing.

Audrey Tang: I would suggest the simple fix, that is the Newsfeed Eradicator that can make this parasitic/symbiotic relationship go away. It makes you much happier. At least, it made me much happier. [laughs] About bringing this kind of freedom to the masses, I would just use one particular example. It will just take a couple seconds.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have a long history of social innovators who took something that looks like opposing forces like the capitalistic regime and the social solidarity regime, into something that is collaborative and adds to each other.

Audrey Tang: There’s many organizations operating for more than 20 years through co-ops, through foundations, through companies and so on that reinforces these forces. I would use one example because it’s literally happening in my office, in the social innovation lab in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: It’s called [Taiwanese] or the Endowed City, which is working with people who are in wheelchairs and are usually street vendors selling, I don’t know, chewing gums, or tissue papers, and so on. Working with them, in a way, through excellent visual assets drawn and designed by people with Down’s syndrome who understand the world through a geometric, not textual way.

Audrey Tang: Because of their unique geometric composition, they get much more people’s attention. Also, gets people into a more relaxed and collaborative mood. Using those regulative designs to address the issue of not knowing what the street vendors’ financial flow is, of their limited interaction with the people on the street, and with their "supply chain management," a very capitalistic term.

Audrey Tang: Basically, the group’s working on enabling them for better interaction, for redesigning the wheelchair to be a mobile station to connect them to the city services of fair trade and so one. They began with nothing else than just a sketch. That’s all they started with.

Audrey Tang: They began to sketch, and now they have a monitor here that can show advertisements, that can, through crowdfunding, share WiFi. You can bring your phone for charging, sharing folded umbrellas and so on.

Audrey Tang: They are operating in Ximending and the Social Innovation Lab right now. These are the kind of social innovations that I speak of, because at first, it is in the masses. You can’t get more massive people than Ximending around here.

Audrey Tang: Also, it brings a different imagination by staying in front of these street vendors a little bit, you’re already participating in the solidarity-building movement by essentially not seeing them as "vulnerable populations," but useful contributors and not just useful, but artful contributors to the streetscape.

Audrey Tang: There’s many more cases like these where the initial intervention of speculative design, I will not say "art" because it’s too positive a term, [laughs] design is more positive in this case. Art may be dystopic, but speculative design always positive. Showing the possibility space.

Audrey Tang: People crowdfund and crowdsource themself into this kind of atmosphere. When I talk about the masses, I’m not talking abstractly. Because of my office hour in the social innovation lab -- this is my office, by the way -- so anyone can come and talk to me including rough sleepers, social workers who work with them and so on, every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM.

Audrey Tang: I also go to people. When I talk about masses, I talk about specific interventions that brings speculative design into the masses, not the masses in abstract.

Shu Lea Cheang: This is probably a very good time to open up a bit of questions from the floor.

Audrey Tang: Since we have an example, and so would somebody else follow?

Shu Lea Cheang: Should someone like to raise hand and microphone can be passed to you?

Audrey Tang: There’s portable microphone next to every seat.

Shu Lea Cheang: Oh, really?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Shu Lea Cheang: OK, cool.

Audrey Tang: Great technology.

Paul B. Preciado: Otherwise if there’s no question for the time begin, I wanted to say that I would fully avoid using the notion of the masses because basically this is a notion that implies that there is a look from the point of view of the state and there is something that we cannot govern that is a mass, something like that.

Paul B. Preciado: Whereas basically what I see with today much more than even if I think about...

Paul B. Preciado: I mean, I’m from Spain. I grew up in the ’80s, so immediately after the dictatorship in Spain. I kind of have the same experience of basically coming from martial law into something else. My experience is that we are the first global generation, and in the sense even if we have like 10 years of difference.

Paul B. Preciado: We are the first global generation who have access in a major way to knowledge, whatever this is, and technologies compared to, let’s say, the generation of our parents or our grandparents. The problem is that we keep looking at society in a very condescending way, like, "Oh, these people, they are stupid. They have no idea." Even, this is also happening within the museum, within the university.

Paul B. Preciado: When you’re elaborating a project, they always tell you, "No, no, you have to do it much slower because people are so stupid, they will understand nothing." You’re like, "What people are you talking about? These people are a hundred times more sophisticated than ever before." Therefore, I think that this is what is really triggering this counter-reform that I was speaking before.

Paul B. Preciado: Is that no one before in history, we have been globally so ready as for a global, planetary revolution, never before. Now, we could do it. My question is the opposite to yours. My question is why we don’t do it? Why we’re not cooperating like crazy altogether. Saying, "Hey guys, we have to live differently."

Paul B. Preciado: We cannot continue producing, consuming, trashing the world, destroying the environment. We immediately need to invent other technologies of living together that might not be directly turned into consumption and production. Therefore, that’s my big question. Another language that is not the language, even, of sustainability. To sustain what?

Paul B. Preciado: There’s nothing to sustain at this point. For me, it has to be a language of transition, of transitioning from this model of economy, production, and planetary destruction into something else. This can only be done collectively. For that, we need to stop looking at bodies, human or not human, organic or non-organic, as masses.

Paul B. Preciado: To start look at them as all of them being an element within a complex technology. Basically, is a question a little bit like what Audrey was speaking about before when she was speaking about how many different either machines or instruments can connect, or cables can be connected to each other?

Paul B. Preciado: We need to use this possibility of multiple connection for something other than for consumption or production. This is the moment of planetary revolution, for me. I hope that some of you can join us.

Audrey Tang: I just want to say these persuasive electric vehicles are coming back to the social innovation lab soon. They’ve visited twice already. They’re self-driving tricycles. When we talk about AI here, I always talk about assistive intelligence, not artificial, assistive intelligence.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just because assistive rhymes with collective so that I can say assistive intelligence working with collective intelligence. It actually really works this way. They’re kind of slow. It doesn’t harm anyone if they run into buildings. They are self-driving. It’s all open-source. You can change it to fit your need.

Audrey Tang: If you go to Jianguo flower market, buy some flowers, put it into the pot, put it onto those PEVs. They will follow you like companion animals. By the end of it, you can hop on one and it drives you home.

Audrey Tang: If you don’t like the red flash used to communicate emotion, you can change it to a face of a dog. Why not? Use other non-verbal means to communicate. The whole point is that it is not a one-on-one relationship. It is not a single lab in the MIT or in any multinational manufacturing mass-producing these creatures. It is back to the idea of personal computing and social computing.

Audrey Tang: Basically, everybody gets to modify and change and tweak the norms around these creatures so that they can fit better into the social fabric by us understanding also better from their perspective.

Audrey Tang: In this sense, they’re not that different from other existing categories that we put on people, the identity politics that Paul just talked about. If we free them up, we think about how to live together.

Audrey Tang: It is the far easier, actually, question to ask than how many representatives are we going to include today from carbon-based and silicon-based life forms, which will not work, actually, in this setting.

Shu Lea Cheang: The sense of you’re actually a fork in the robot. I think we also mentioned about fork in the democracy, want to kind of bring back as what Paul was saying the paradigm revolution, I think, is a very important term, actually.

Shu Lea Cheang: Whatever the frustration from the election today in Taiwan or on the right-wing taking over globally, I think as an artist, who we are, curator, philosopher, cultural workers.

Shu Lea Cheang: I include everybody in this room. It’s back to what would the resistance means, particularly in the certain, going back to the title, three times three times six, the civilian system that we live in, what would resistance mean today?

Shu Lea Cheang: I feel myself, as Paul said, I’m also a activist. I’m also a media activist. We are the code activist. In this case, I’m always wondering about the masses. I get back to the masses.

Shu Lea Cheang: The masses, all the mundanity or the masses on the street holding the rainbow flag particularly, for example or the recent rainbow on the Facebook status [laughs] report. These kind of, I think it’s almost like what would be this kind of gesture, the gesture of resistance.

Shu Lea Cheang: In a certain way, I think we are coming back to more of a gesture of resistance. I’m not so sure about how to generate the power of resistance. I think before, when we are out on the street, we are counting the heads, and we’re counting the hats, how many people on the street.

Shu Lea Cheang: We know all the time, by the time we got home and watch the TV, this was before the mobile phone time, that the television report, the media report, will cut the masses into half.

Shu Lea Cheang: The police report also cut the mass into maybe one third. In a certain way, what would these masses be? Again, we’ve been through the street movement, and we also through the digital disturbance on the net. Either in terms...I really want to question Paul’s idea about very much to find the new grammar, the paradigm, and basically reposition ourselves. Isn’t it? How do we reposition ourselves?

Paul B. Preciado: Before I thought there was a question. Someone that had a question there. Just in case, after you’ve been waiting for so long...

Audrey Tang: Like finally.

Paul B. Preciado: ...talking about cooperation, without letting you speak for two hours, I think is too much.

Audrey Tang: Would you like to...because there’s people watching live streaming.

Audience Member: 我可能代表年紀比較大、保守那一派的，這一次選舉，我想唐先生，好嗎？你也是官員，因為剛剛好像談了很多同性戀，這一次公投是挫敗的，對不對？我想在座是同意吧！您對這個有什麼看法？

Audience Member: 我們臺灣認同同志戀，剛剛討論了很多，剛剛最後一個鄭女士，她說的……我不曉得這個為什麼突然斷電？繼續拿著彩虹旗在街頭抗爭，有什麼意義？

Audience Member: 我不是台北市人，我是新北市人，我從苗栗趕來，我頭腦沒有說很脫節，我常常看新聞；都沒有翻譯？我不曉得他等一下翻譯得出來嗎？

Audrey Tang: 有同步翻譯。

Audience Member: 好。因為關係到我們整個社會，臺灣真的是很自由，說真的我感覺到不會比美國更不自由，甚至青出於藍。

Audience Member: 這一次公投是不是表示我們臺灣社會對於同志這一段時間來的，尤其我們蔡總統，也許我比較沒有瞭解，但是我常常看新聞，她是不是世界上獨一、還沒有結婚的就當上國家領導人的總統？好像同志們就藉著總統（國家元首）好像懷疑同性戀，不是我懷疑喔！她在剛當選的時候，有一個民進黨的元老就質疑她，我從報紙上很大的篇幅就在質疑她是不是同性戀，她沒有答覆，所以是不是鼓勵我們很多同性戀在蔡英文任內來爭取婚姻平權？

Audience Member: 這一次公投才幾個？5、6個，是不是？同志的公投佔了至少1/3到1/2吧！是不是？我想請唐先生是不是可以提出你的感想？或者是將來同志戀應該要怎麼樣？讓我們社會觀感會好一點還怎麼樣？下一次公投是不是大家可以爭取更多的公投票的同意？謝謝。

Audrey Tang: 我就用現代漢語回答。

Audrey Tang: 我想第一個是我們先看事實的部分，您剛才說在世界上臺灣是不是一個比美國還要自由的地方？我想這個是可以實際去量測的。

Audrey Tang: 這也是在世界上有一個叫做「CIVICUS Monitor」組織，每一次只要發生一件事，是把人的言論、自由、集會自由、結社自由等等剝奪掉的國家力量去剝奪人民自由的，當地的人權團體就會回報到這裡，然後這個國家就會扣分，直到這個國家的法制或情況改變，讓這一些人有這樣的自由為止，所以確實你看「亞洲」，再選「完全自由」，只有臺灣而已，而且一路到非洲都是這樣子，我想這個是事實。

Audrey Tang: 我們不是說比紐西蘭、澳洲，或者一些北歐或者是歐洲的朋友們市民空間來得大，可能沒有到這個地步，但是至少在這個區域，我們應該是自由的程度是最大的，按照這個網站的寫法，可能跟加拿大也是類似，是比美國好一些的，這個都是事實，我想這個是可以彼此同意的。

Audrey Tang: 第二個也是事實的部分，我想這一次就像剛剛淑麗說的，大家在FB上面確實也都看到了很多人換成彩虹顏色的頭像，或者是有一個是「Together Stronger」，大家在一起就可以變得好像比較強一些，我想在公投之後有這樣子一個大規模的、大家覺得好像要在一起變得更強的想法，我想這個也是事實。這個是我們都可以客觀看到的，我想這些大概大家都不爭執，這些都是真的。

Audrey Tang: 那至於臺灣作為一個言論自由、集會、結社自由這麼高的地方，當然大家都有自由去覺得說，好比像您剛剛提到同性戀者的永久結合，像婚姻的權利要不要叫「婚姻」，這個是雙方都有言論自由去說，一邊覺得應該就叫「婚姻」，另外一邊叫「伴侶」或「同性婚姻」或是別的，但總之不是婚姻，我想這個也是事實的部分。

Audrey Tang: 接下來我就要講感受的部分，我自己小時候我記得家人告訴我說婚姻是一個社會儀式，就是要請客、請好命婆之類的，有一些社會角色，要辦一個很大的婚禮活動，而這個活動發生之後，婚姻就完成了。

Audrey Tang: 但是活動發生之後也許可以登記，但這個登記是事後追認，結婚是家族的事情、社會的事情，盛大辦一個儀式，婚姻就完成了。但是state，我們政府很後面再做就好了。就像人出生就出生了，你再去辦出生登記，那個是事後的事。

Audrey Tang: 但是比我年紀小的朋友們，我們從2007年改成登記婚制度之後，對婚姻的想像是完全不一樣的，在2007年之後婚姻是政府的動作，你去戶政事務所登記結婚，登記完之後不管你有沒有辦婚禮，不管你婚禮是在之前或者是之後辦，甚至乾脆不辦婚禮，或者是婚禮只有兩個見證人來，隨便，這個都叫「婚姻」。這是小一輩的朋友們、2007年以後結婚的朋友們，對婚姻是這樣的想像。

Audrey Tang: 這個事情就像Paul剛剛講的，我們在講marriage的時候，我們現在採取2007年以後一種西方的觀點，是國家所給予的權利、保護等等，但是這個在2007年以前在臺灣並不是這樣子的，我們覺得婚姻就是家族的事情、是大家的事情，所以我覺得重點倒不是哪一邊對。很可能並沒有哪一邊對的問題，很可能是同樣「婚姻」兩個字，不同世代的朋友們腦裡冒出來的景象完全不一樣。

Audrey Tang: 因此當公投說「您是否覺得民法婚姻……」之類的時候，投的人、蓋下去的東西，看到「婚姻」二字的時候，很可能腦裡冒出來是不一樣的，年輕的朋友是去戶政事務所登記，但是老一輩的朋友冒起來，很可能是辦一個很大的喜酒，如果是信別的宗教也許有證婚的動作，我想這個對話的開始，是我們這一次公投才讓這個對話開始。

Audrey Tang: 我有很多朋友因為這一次的公投才所謂的出櫃，就是跟家裡的人說他同性戀的經驗，或者是雙性戀的經驗，或者是跨性別的經驗，他家人第一次瞭解到他的角度來看婚姻，或者是他們家長角度看婚姻是不一樣的。

Audrey Tang: 我想這個對話才剛開始，你說這個對話往哪一個地方走也不一定，但是有對話本身是一個好事，這個是我的回答。

Audience Member: It’s a big pleasure, an honor to be here today. My question concerns the idea of liberal democracy and also the inclusion of people into families having children, marriage also.

Audience Member: Just a small story. I was at a seminar organized by the United Nations University in Japan this summer. Many of the speakers, they spoke of getting rights to minorities because it was focused on Sustainable Development Goals from a gender perspective.

Audience Member: My constant question was, how is it that it’s so focused on getting these equal rights? I just spoke of marriage. In many countries today, there is a special treatment for people who are married. They get tax preferences, access to certain services, etc., or that adoption for some of the people having children also get special treatment.

Audience Member: Why is it often focused as getting the inclusions of certain minorities when it may rather be the case of, for example, not having marriage for a specific set of minorities, but rather perhaps not having the concept of marriage in society at all, that the people are free?

Paul B. Preciado: We can barely listen. Can you maybe use the mic or use the...?

Audience Member: Is it better now? I guess talk again.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audience Member: The main idea I wanted to say is that it’s often focused on getting or the lectures in the seminar...I’m sorry. I’m not very familiar with this whole subject. It’s focused on getting equal access to marriage and having a family, etc., which is a very normative concept, I think.

Audience Member: I was wondering, why is there such a focus on getting people into these definitions instead of perhaps, legally at least, getting rid of or freeing people from the definition of marriage and preferential treatment, having a family, giving the preferential treatment in society by law and the government to a certain set of people instead of as a liberal democracy where we would have more equal rights to everyone?

Audience Member: Which is also, by the way, very strange that if the law states that all persons are equal, still legally there’s been such a maltreatment. Mistreatment still continues today. I’m wondering how the lawmakers are actually coping with this due to the fact that it should state that everyone should be treated equally, but they’re obviously not.

Audience Member: My main question is, I wonder why is the debate perhaps often focused on getting people into these definitions of marriage, family, and legal preferential treatment of certain people and sometimes perhaps not much focused on removing these legal concepts and letting people define that between themselves, between their own contracts between persons, seeing them as individuals rather than as legal persons intervened in a very specific legal concept?

Shu Lea Cheang: Paul, you want to pick up? Maybe we talked briefly on this, because I think you did talk about some of these issues in terms the marriage and the norm.

Paul B. Preciado: Yeah. Maybe a way of asking to both questions at the same time. I understand the worries of the person who spoke before in the sense that I also went through the debate, for instance, in Europe, in France, in Spain, or in other places. I heard also the complaints from not just the older generation. I used to hearing these remarks.

Paul B. Preciado: For me, it’s interesting to think about. A very basic issue is who is allowed to be a full citizen in a given society. Therefore, as long as we keep positions of a subaltern citizenship, like basically, I would say bodies because as long as not full citizenship has been granted to a body, you’re not really fully human in this society.

Paul B. Preciado: For instance, in a certain society, being human means having the right to get married and to celebrate your marriage with your family and give a big banquet and this part of a social ritual. If you’re not able to do that, therefore you’re kind of excluded out of what it means to be human within that society.

Paul B. Preciado: I think that it’s impossible to discriminate by law. This is what we’re talking about when...I mean as much as I have been saying before that myself, I think the most radical thing to do would be abolishing the gender assignment at birth.

Paul B. Preciado: I think this is the most radical thing to do. As long as we’re not ready to have that debate, meanwhile, if you want, as a kind of tactical or strategic politics, we can also get into debates of more reform in terms of the law, which also can be...both discussions can happen at the same time and are happening at the same time in fact.

Paul B. Preciado: While some of the most radical, let’s say, critical thinkers within gender, we’re discussing like how to change the paradigm and how to change the framework as long as defining how many genders we will be assigning or maybe no gender.

Paul B. Preciado: At the same time, there can be a debate that has to do with the reform within the law to create more spaces of full citizenship and avoid violence of the state of state violence and state discrimination.

Paul B. Preciado: This is what we...I mean I think that if we have citizens that are allowed to get married and some that are not allowed to get married because of different reasons -- it can be because they are like homosexual, transsexual but also because they are like, let’s say, as we said the other day, Down syndrome or what happens, for instance, when you are in jail to come back to the project that we’ve been discussing with and we’re working on towards the Benny’s biennial with Shu Lea.

Paul B. Preciado: When you’re in prison, you have absolutely no rights. You’re really stripped of all your rights. Is this even legal? Maybe not. What are the conditions that grant full citizenship in a certain society?

Paul B. Preciado: I think as long as we have are still defining citizenship in terms of having access to marriage, then we need to say anybody can have access to marriage. Otherwise, we have to abolish marriage. If we are not doing that, then we agree that the state can discriminate.

Paul B. Preciado: For instance, what I think myself, when we’re having debates on feminism, for instance, is that we are operating already a kind of discrimination as soon as we assign gender at birth. That’s the way in which we’re saying, "Male or female. Therefore if it’s female, let’s throw it to the garbage."

Paul B. Preciado: We know what globally within this patriarchal heterosexual regime means to be female, no matter that some people decide to be female otherwise. When you are assigned female at birth, this is the reality.

Paul B. Preciado: I think it’s an issue of avoiding discrimination and changing the conditions that give access to citizenship. Those can be discussed. I think it’s a very good thing that they’re...

Paul B. Preciado: Shu Lea’s telling me to be short, but that we are discussing these things. I think this is the most important thing. Nothing can be solved in one vote. It’s voted, fine. It’s lost, OK. If it’s next time, whatever. Let’s keep talking about it.

Shu Lea Cheang: It’s very difficult for me to break your conversation, particularly it’s a very emotional statement. I think this talk about the gender and about this gender at birth that related to the marriage system that we seem to be sudden concern has been such a big issues and is such a big grand issues and in terms of what we have gone through today in all the topics we talk about, it’s true. It’s such a heavy issue.

Shu Lea Cheang: We also moved the time up, 4:30. I don’t know if the streaming had a particular time limit here, but I do, maybe as an artist moderator, which moderating artist, [laughs] I want to maybe bring to the two last question. Actually, this is some question I will not attempt to answer.

Shu Lea Cheang: I think it seems as an artist and people are still feeling as an artist, I think we are facing the issue about being an artist and not what would be the connection with the general public or our art not being understood by the general public or someone posting that our conversation here today would never understood by the general public.

Shu Lea Cheang: Nobody would look at our discussion video for more than one minute. With that remark, I close this panel.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for your questions.

Paul B. Preciado: Thank you.