Audrey Tang: All right.

Michael Connor: Yngve, would you like to start?

Yngve Holen: Me? Yeah. Good morning, you. Good morning. I’m an artist. I primarily work with sculpture, and it’s different materials. It could be very classical, and then glass, metalwork, to using ready-made for medical industry, airplane industry. It’s different from time to time.

Yngve Holen: It used to be, I would say, that when I came out of school more…I tried to be more conceptually or I tried to get more information into my sculpture, I guess sometimes more than I thought was possible for the viewer to read.

Yngve Holen: There was a split in my production, where I decided that I want to act purely on form, or it appears to be a conversation piece, and be able to kick start many conversations, and not just the illustration, and that one dimensional reading off a topic. I started publishing research in terms of texts. I started doing interviews with people when I was interested.

Yngve Holen: It’s often industry-related, but I’m interested in. It started off with an interview, where I was just interested in aviation at the time. I was wondering how it was to be a pilot. We got the pilot. There was an anonymous interview with the pilot, and so he could say certain things about his airline that he maybe couldn’t say if he would say it under his company name.

Yngve Holen: That became the pilot issue, and it went into a series of publications relating to adult industry, entertainment industry, plastic surgery, and then I went into the rainforest, and food production.

Yngve Holen: Different topics that interested me. They were printed publications, question-answer, anonymized, not to protect people, but more the thing that you could have a high and low.

Yngve Holen: Again, the last one was about brand. If you would speak with a very famous neuroscientist in Germany, he would already have done 50 interviews, so you just get the same interview that we had done for the last magazine. If you would maybe speak with a younger researcher who’s not a public persona, sometimes, the language and the way of speaking about the field was just more interesting.

Yngve Holen: If you then anonymized it, it wouldn’t be like this, read who is famous, don’t read who is not famous. You get more like a…

Michael Connor: How many of those interview topics have you done, or what were the interview topics that you’ve…

Yngve Holen: They take time. The first one was the aviation one. It’s called ETOPS, and it’s a certification for a twin jet, a two-motor airline plane, and how long it’s allowed to fly. It was a certification that started when…

Yngve Holen: It means extended operations, and that was just the idea. How far can you go with the topic before it falls apart as a metaphor? That’s the pilot issue, which is more pictures. It has the Q&R with the pilot in the back, which I thought was really cool.

Yngve Holen: Then there was one on the LA porn industry, but also on the plastic surgery industry, unrelated. It’s like somehow a magazine about being young, trading your body for money, or being old, trading your money to become younger kind of trajectory.

Yngve Holen: LA, then there’s one where we went to Brazil and to Peru. It’s about rainforest, but it’s also about tasting menu, a la Chef’s Table, where reinventing national cuisine through food. Biodiversity of monoculture somehow is the…but they’re all, it’s all text savvy, full-on interviews.

Yngve Holen: They’re all 12 interviews a piece. Then there’s the last one – we cut the format, so it’s a little bit more like “Pulp Fiction” – which is called ETOPS Headache, and it’s about neuroscience. It’s 2020, so it’s…These are the magazines, basically.

Michael Connor: Thank you. Minister Tang, any questions, or shall I hand it over to you?

Audrey Tang: No, not too much, but by making this an online-only medium, we’re going to talk about most of the audience using two-dimensional screens. How navigable is it? Are we looking at mostly a web-based presentation?

Audrey Tang: To explore an interactive space through web, it’s possible, of course. There’s WebVR, WebXR, and things like that, but are we looking at these kind of more pretending there’s a solid in your room interactions, or are we just looking at a more flat imagination, like two-dimensional video of a pre-oriented object?

Michael Connor: I think the event itself is pretty much anticipated to be video-based, but we’d be open to other kinds of experimentation, if you were both excited about something along those lines. I think I guess you were picking up on the fact that Yngve is a sculptor.

Michael Connor: I suppose that, because our brief is so open-ended, yes, I can imagine there could be something three-dimensional that’s produced. I think it also could be, the way that seven-on-seven conversations go, it also could be that what gets produced is a website or something that is a little bit different in format than Yngve’s usual practice, especially because there’s not a huge amount of time.

Michael Connor: I think that one of the things that Yngve’s work often involves is a lot of industrial process, which I think we probably wouldn’t want to get into.

Michael Connor: I think maybe there are other ways of bringing that in. I guess my answer is we’re open to anything, but the primary default format is video. I didn’t necessarily think you were to here to make a 3D object.

Michael Connor: Making a 3D model could be an interesting prompt for Yngve, but there could be many other approaches to this.

Audrey Tang: The closest I have personally worked with sculpture is Tilt Brush. It’s a virtual reality application where you essentially sculpt in VR. Through video only, it’s hard to explore a Tilt Brush object.

Audrey Tang: If you were not looking for that, then maybe I will just drop this whole virtual reality thing. I am personally doing a lot of my work in virtual reality and around virtual reality, but it does require specific interaction modes.

Audrey Tang: For example, like in Taiwan, we are currently having this very affordable headset called XR Space that’s very light. You can wear it for three or four hours. The resolution is pretty good. There’s no controller. You just control it using your hands.

Audrey Tang: Basically, you use this built-in scanner with 5G connection. It can scan your entire room into a virtual room. Also, you, of course, as a double avatar. It cuts a lot of the modeling steps that’s usually associated, like photogrammetry, videogrammetry, etc.

Audrey Tang: I understand if the time is limited, and most of the viewers are not going to be interacting through interactive viewers, anyway, then there’s no point in even considering extended reality. That’s fine. I’m just here to ensure the perimeter of our collaboration.

Michael Connor: That does seem very interesting, but maybe if you could take a step back for a moment and just get in your own words a brief introduction and where you are in your practice at this moment, which I know is a long and complicated trajectory now. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not very complicated. I’m a poetician. I mostly write poems and inspiring prayers. I’m a lowercase minister. It means I preach, I guess, about a digital transformation, sustainability, inclusive innovation, this sort.

Audrey Tang: I recently had a few long conversations, one with Yuval Harari, the historian, about why I’m optimistic as much as he is pessimistic about assistive intelligence and stuff.

Audrey Tang: This conversation, which I posted here, covers most of the motif that my own poetic work is based on. Previously, I also had a long conversation – actually, two – with Paul B. Preciado around queer in the politics, I guess.

Audrey Tang: As a genderqueer, the first openly transgender cabinet member in the world, I believe, there is also a lot of interesting conversations around nonbinary thinking and how to take it into politics. I would say non-duality is the main idea that I am working in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: This includes the duality between the government and the people. I am at this La Grange Point between the movements on one side and government and the other, and working on things like counter-COVID.

Audrey Tang: We’re officially post-pandemic for quite a few months now, which works really well, because there’s whole-sector mobilization on the sort of innovations. It’s just poetic work, really, but it seems to really get into the current zeitgeist of people wanting to feel much closer together.

Audrey Tang: The interaction can either be an antisocial media or a prosocial media. I worked for a very long time on social interaction design for prosocial media rather than antisocial media.

Audrey Tang: That’s how the current digital democracy work that I am doing in Taiwan, but also other places, including with the Ethereum community through the RadicalxChange Foundation and so on are based. That’s more or less it.

Michael Connor: You say you write poems at the moment?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, my job description literally is a poem. I basically just write blogs that are poems. My job description, literally a poem or a prayer, goes like this. It’s a very short poem. As the Digital Minister, it’s like this.

Audrey Tang: “When we see Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of Beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. And whenever we hear the singularity is near, let us remember the plurality is here.”

Audrey Tang: Those kind of poems, yeah.

Michael Connor: Policy as poem is a…

Audrey Tang: Poetician, yeah.

Michael Connor: [laughs] Poetician. Interesting. I guess similar, I know that you had done some reading before the meeting as well. I guess just in terms of your own preconceptions maybe or of early ideas, but was one of your thoughts coming into this collaboration that it could spark an issue of ETOPS?

Michael Connor: Which I know was a major undertaking, or I guess you’re still thinking about different possibilities.

Yngve Holen: Yeah, being online, reading, taking in, I really liked the poems. I think it’s a really cool format to work in politics with. The thing with ETOPS, we decided, it’s a collaboration also with Matthew Evans, who I did some of them with.

Yngve Holen: It’s not printed, because it’s a slow process. It’s something where it’s like, I don’t know how many people read them, either, but it’s there. If it will be online, that kind of format, I think it wouldn’t work in the same often.

Yngve Holen: I often thought about, would it work online? As a printed, 100 pages manuscript, where you could dive into it, it’s accessible, but it’s not like…I never figured out. We deliberately didn’t go online with it and thought about a slow distribution and doing topics that are lasting.

Yngve Holen: I could be interested in being able to figure out how to make an online version, of course. I think that would be interesting.

Michael Connor: Also, I guess I should say, two things. First of all. When is that? Although the event is online, the project itself doesn’t have to live online. One of the things to know is that there’s a lot of uncertainty because of COVID, but we are planning to have an exhibition early next year.

Michael Connor: There is some potential to create work for a gallery context and have video portion of seven-on-seven be a conversation about a project. That’s one way to approach. Even if the Consultavanger exhibition didn’t happen, that would still be a valid way to approach.

Michael Connor: I think that we should look at the web as a possibility but not as a limitation. I wanted to say that, when I bring pairs together, because I know this…Especially since we have limited time together, there’s a desire to find concrete ideas.

Michael Connor: Of course, by suggesting ETOPS, I am myself falling into that. The way that I’d describe these collaborations often is through a story about the artist, David Hammons, a famous artist from first LA and then New York that makes a lot of interesting conceptual work.

Michael Connor: In the ‘80s, he would set up a project in Washington Square Park where he would make snowballs and sell the snowballs during winter storms. One time in an interview, someone asked him, “Why do you make these snowballs? Why don’t you just sit there…”

Michael Connor: “Look, if the point is to have conversations, why don’t you just sit there and talk to people?” David Hammons said, “Well, if you’re just a person on the street, people don’t know how to interact. If you have an object between you, the object allows a kind of conversation to happen.”

Michael Connor: I like to think of the prompt for seven-on-seven as being to make snowballs. It’s not necessarily a highly-crafted object, but it allows a conversation to happen that wouldn’t happen otherwise. I think let’s focus maybe, I was a bit of a miss…

Michael Connor: Rather than focusing on ETOPS or a format, you mentioned the poems are interesting, Yngve. I wonder, I guess the other thing that jumps out from your conversation is just thinking about industrial process as an aspect of your work.

Michael Connor: I know that Minister Tang is very involved in, I think, conversations that involve people, also, industry in Taiwan, potentially. I wondered if there was more to talk about on that front.

Audrey Tang: I just read a few pages of ETOPS. “These eggs would never get organic seals of approval, inhalation, what is luxury, and resistance.”

Audrey Tang: I think it’s a good, with those long em-dashes, or with the two em-dashes, a really good prompt format.

Audrey Tang: It really reminds me of the SayIt website that I’ve been using as I just keep pasting you those SayIt links. That’s because all the meetings that I hold as a chair, as a digital minister, were transcribed and posted online.

Audrey Tang: You can see this whole catalog of me talking to 5,000 people in over 200,000 speeches in more than 1,300 occasions. Most of the professional photographer who want to take my portrait or whatever, I also ask them to relinquish part of their copyright into the commons.

Audrey Tang: You incidentally also have a lot of interesting portrait-ish photo that seems to go well with the ETOPS format. Almost if we want to minimize our work, we can just simply write a simple program, and then for Holen to curate the format and me the content, and maybe work with some assistive intelligence folks. We just generate, I don’t know, 500,000 issues of ETOPS-like literature. [laughs] Build your own ETOPS with those seeded text and photography.

Audrey Tang: That would be what we in the computer science people say a quick win. It means that it’s cheap and cheerful, meaning that each of us maybe have to put in only a few hours into it, but then you have this endless kaleidoscope of ETOPS-like work on the web. That’s a possibility.

Yngve Holen: It’s insane how much, huh? Do you type it all yourself?

Audrey Tang: Of course, it’s a combination of AI and human intelligence, but yes. Basically, I see my work in the administration as a journalist, I guess, just to report how the cabinet works to the people.

Yngve Holen: Yeah, it’s great. I was reading some of them yesterday. I liked the setup of it. It’s really like, yeah.

Audrey Tang: If you like it, then you can be part of it tomorrow. We can make a transcript of this conversation.

Yngve Holen: I was also looking into stuff like I was reading about using blockchain technology to monitor the environment in Taiwan or pollution. Was I right, or did I get that wrong, the air boxes, where people use a blockchain report?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, not just air quality, but also water quality, and many other things as well.

Yngve Holen: That’s open function, and a lot of people are using that?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. If you want to take a look at it, you can see the interactive map. It’s right here.

Yngve Holen: Amazing, yeah.

Audrey Tang: Yes, yeah. Michael just pasted our conversation in March. You can recontextualize this conversation, in light of our previous one. For me, really, this is something that’s already structured. It’s machine-readable. We can synthesize conversations, even if we want. That, for me, is like a quick win.

Yngve Holen: Yeah, interesting.

Michael Connor: Yngve, you were asking about the blockchain environment as of…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s a lot of Ethereum development, it’s also done in Taiwan. There’s a natural affinity to ledger technology.

Yngve Holen: I was reading about this. This project, we’re using blockchain to monitor the environment, if there’s pollution, air pollution, water pollution. In the same way, I was reading about making maps of where you can get available masks.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s the same idea. At the moment, my latest project was also an interactive map in which you can see where to get those stimulus coupons. It’s based on the same principle as those mask map or environmental map.

Audrey Tang: This is just this default thing that Taiwanese people would expect from the civil society’s collaboration with the government to provide whereabouts of all the essential services, as well as the environment.

Yngve Holen: Everything’s really real-time now. It’s even like seeing the conversation online now, like what I do, it’s not always so. [laughs] Work on something for a year, not publish, nothing, but slow it down.

Yngve Holen: It’s the same thing with [inaudible 23:47] . The medium is so [inaudible 23:52] see this [inaudible 23:56]. [laughs] Something like that.

Michael Connor: Yeah, the timing, that’s interesting.

Yngve Holen: …think about the speeds of publishing.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, ledgers also give digital medium a book-like quality in the sense that you can’t go back in time and change it. If it’s printed, it’s minted. Like the blockchain people says, “We mint something. We mine something.” It’s give it a solidity from digital material.

Audrey Tang: I propose that maybe let’s settle the format. Maybe you would like to just give this ideal, like from your view what kind of format would capture this. We don’t have to do this in this conversation.

Audrey Tang: Once you decide the format, then I can work on the material as well as the synthetic logic that goes into making the content work so there’s a very clear vision of this is just a manifestation, what we call in AI a style transfer. “Audrey Tang in the style of ETOPS” or something like that.

Yngve Holen: I like the thinking.

Michael Connor: I know you only have a few more minutes to wrap up. On the point about deciding later, I know our next meeting is in August. Is it OK to have email communication in the meantime?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. We can keep going through email. With your consent, I’ll just make this a transcript so we can also be meta about this conversation and think about how this conversation would look like in the style of ETOPS.

Yngve Holen: I have a question. How does the presentation of you look like? I’ve been going through 13, 14, 15, and different. It’s different. Sometimes you have a suit on, and you’re a presenter.

Yngve Holen: Sometimes there have been physical objects on the stage. Sometimes there are no projects. Most has been in the physical space. People sit in front of a screen project. Now it’s going to be online. It’s almost going to be like this?

Michael Connor: It’s a good question. I would like to arrange an on-camera interview for each of you. Minister Tang, we might have to do this during your next scheduled meeting…

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Michael Connor: …just build that in. My hope is to have the event open with a short video where we learn about each of your practices and your background. That would involve an on-camera interview as well as, potentially, some sort of archival material that we bring together shown in previous projects.

Michael Connor: It’s something we can have a New York-based person named Lauren Siegel, that would direct all of that. We’ve worked with Lauren quite a while. Very good for taking on board artists’ concerns or technologists’ concerns or shaping things a certain way.

Michael Connor: Then it would move into a live presentation of the project. You’re quite right that the online format does skew it a bit, but I would introduce each of you. Then the two of you would share the project and have an open-ended discussion.

Michael Connor: As I mentioned, if there’s a way to break the format, we would be open to it always. The main thing is you’ll have a 30-minute window and a mixture of pre-recorded and live material, including some time for discussion with myself as moderator.

Yngve Holen: I’m getting really into this idea of using, how you say…I have to go look into it, how would these websites work or how you’re text recording of any interview that you do. It’s amazing. I don’t know how to say it. [laughs] I like the good idea. It’s something cool there that interests me in relation to how to mint something digitally.

Michael Connor: Yngve, Minister Tang gave you a lot of prompts. Why don’t you take it away and we’ll continue the conversation over…

Yngve Holen: Yes.

Michael Connor: We’ll look for the transcript of this in the newspapers tomorrow?

Yngve Holen: Yeah, right. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Yngve Holen: Is there anything that you want me to send in terms of physical content? Do you want me to send some books of the magazines for this project? I could just wrap it up and send it your way. Is that of interest?

Michael Connor: Minister Tang, would you like some books or other gifts from Norway? Berlin, rather.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Of course, that would help, but what I’m looking at more is some sketches of your imagination of the format. If you would like to say, “Oh, this is exactly the same as this,” then, of course, that would help.

Audrey Tang: If it’s like, “Please draw inspiration from this,” then that helps less. If we have the style and the content decoupled a little bit at the beginning, then I would just work with the style, the format that you settle on, instead of being part of this style or formatting work.

Yngve Holen: Totally agree. That’s essential for any production from my head, whether it’s sculptures of…Yeah, totally.

Audrey Tang: All right. I’m done. I do have another meeting to do. Sorry about that. This is a very short 30-minute session, but really looking forward to work with you.

Yngve Holen: The same.

Audrey Tang: Cheers. Bye.

Michael Connor: Thank you for so much. Have a great evening.

Audrey Tang: Live long. Prosper. [laughs]