Audrey Tang: I’m really happy to meet you in videoconference. Just as a quick question, I received an invitation saying that it will be in, what, Sweden? In Norway, in Nordic countries?

Michael Connor: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: That is still the case even if it’s postponed to October?

Michael Connor: That’s correct. Our partner for this coming edition is Kunsthall Stavanger. It’s institution in Norway that we have known for a long time.

Audrey Tang: That’s awesome.

Michael Connor: With the delay, we’ll have the opportunity to present an exhibition, which we’ve never done as part of Seven on Seven. Also, there’s a lot of, I guess, uncertainty in the…

Audrey Tang: Of course. We’re not actually 100 percent set on the…This date will be the final date, or are you already finalized, the date?

Michael Connor: It’s pretty much finalized.

Audrey Tang: Good.

Michael Connor: It’s definitely not happening in June. October 3rd has been approved by the new museum director, which is our main partner in New York. It’s pretty solid now.

Audrey Tang: Just update on my side, I will be in Nova Scotia, Canada by the end of September. I may actually be in New York City right afterward, which is late September. There is a chance that it may be possible for me to participate in person. Not because it’s easier to fly from New York City to Nordic countries. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s roughly the same amounts of flight as compared to Taiwan. It’s that I’m already overseas anyway. I can make it a prolonged trip if there is funding for me to fly to New York, to your site.

Michael Connor: That should be doable. That’s good to know. It would be great to work with you on this. Ellen was telling me that you’re a hero with your coronavirus mask mapping efforts in…

Audrey Tang: I facilitated it. I didn’t personally code anything other than the list of applications. I did the map, not the territory. It’s quite artsy, actually. The various layouts that I just posted you that you can get from this map, where every 30 seconds, the stock level just depletes in real-time. We have a lot of really good analysis of the current demands and things like that.

Audrey Tang: All in all, I think it’s a interesting art project even [laughs] if we just show the dashboard, the time series, the various issues around the demand and supply and how people’s behavior change before and after this transparency of the stock to quell the panic, fear, uncertainty, doubt, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: This intervention is not just speculative design or mechanism design, it’s actually quite inspirational in terms of the various application that people make out of these data. It’s like visualization as art.

Michael Connor: Interesting. It also definitely speaks to the problem of managing anxiety and managing those concerns, because I think in the US, there’s nothing like this. Instead, people just buy all the masks. They don’t get to necessarily where they’re needed and so forth.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s becoming like a symbol of protection.

Michael Connor: I’ll take some more time to look at this later.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Michael Connor: That seems like an interesting topic. You know a little bit of the background of Seven on Seven already from the emails.

Audrey Tang: Of course. Yes.

Michael Connor: Should I give you a quick intro while we’re here or…

Audrey Tang: If it’s already on the rhizome.org, then you can assume that I’ve read it.

Michael Connor: The project is very open-ended. When we pair people up, we tell them to make something new. There’s a lot of different avenues that it can go, and it really depends on your collaboration.

Michael Connor: We tend to pair people through a process of conversation and that sort of thing. The person that I had initially had in mind for you was Jesse Darling. I don’t know if you happen to look at their work at all.

Michael Connor: It’s not an obvious fit necessarily, but Jesse’s work often deals with healing and the relationship between technology and the body. Their work is really, really quite poetic, but I think they do get to very interesting concrete questions about embodied experience.

Michael Connor: I’m not necessarily sure that they’re available for collaboration, but I’m curious if their work resonates.

Audrey Tang: I just had a look. I think that will work. I had a conversation with Paul Preciado on 3x3x6 that’s been used by any other. I don’t know whether you had a chance to check that out because it’s I think really well-configured. Shu Lea Cheang, our common friend, arranged for that conversation. I think it worked really well.

Audrey Tang: We did that on the Taipei Contemporary Art Museum as well. It’s a real-time talk/performance that we call it democracy and transition, but we actually talk about anything but democracy. [laughs] Here is the recording if you have copious time.

Michael Connor: I haven’t seen this.

Audrey Tang: Here is the transcripts if you don’t have copious time. I think anything along this line is good to me because it’s the native merge that I operate. From the text, “The Letter to the translator,” the “11 Dreams,” and things like that, that I just had a glance from the Jesse Darling’s page. It looks like that it’s possible for us to do something like a Preciado dialogue on top of this.

Michael Connor: One person who’s been involved conversations for this edition is Shu Lea herself, who’s an old friend of mine actually. I know that you were part of her sleep project that was at Performa, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I am the person who puts the most people to sleep.

Michael Connor: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Just a second. I’ll be back in 30 seconds. Just a second.

Audrey Tang: Yes, because my office was within the Taiwan C-LAB, the Contemporary Culture Lab, in which Shu Lea did the sleep project. I’m very close, literally walking one-minute distance from these cutting edge, our stuff.

Audrey Tang: There’s also a kind of immersive soundscape studio lab that is just exhibited a few…We can be in different cities, but because of this high-quality immersive sound, we can feel like we’re in the same room and things like that. It’s all very natural, I guess, for me to work on that kind of project.

Michael Connor: Cool. Shu Lea could be potentially someone to pair you with. In general, I like it when people in Seven on Seven don’t know each other beforehand. A bit of a downside to that idea but…

Audrey Tang: No. I like meeting new people. I didn’t have any experience with Preciado. It’s just Shu Lea put us together. Something like that I think will definitely work.

Michael Connor: Cool. I’ll take a look at that video. We have a little bit of time to think about pairings. There’s a lot of people that are in the mix already. Is it OK if I email you when I have possible ideas…?

Audrey Tang: No problem. I’ll be paired as a technologist or as a artist? [laughs]

Michael Connor: Yeah, as a technologist.

Audrey Tang: I’m the technologist. Just checking.

Michael Connor: Very good question. I think we acknowledge that there’s a lot of gray area between these two categories. There have definitely been people slotted in one side or the other that crossover. Minister of Digital for Taiwan, you can qualify as a technologist.

Audrey Tang: Also, a poetician.

Michael Connor: Politics/poetics as technology.

Audrey Tang: Just email me directly. Let’s keep open the possibility of me flying either from Nova Scotia or from New York City.

Michael Connor: I should say something. The other piece of it is the process, because a lot are curious about that. That’s a bit organic. What I usually do, once we have a pairing established and everyone’s on board, then usually we’d have a kickoff call together. Then, as part of that, we would draft a rough schedule.

Michael Connor: In some cases, it makes sense to get people together. In this case, it might depend. Everything can sometimes happen remotely. Usually, there’s a little bit of exchange that goes on with it.

Audrey Tang: I’m happy, too, to work actually within…As I said, the office that I have is within the Contemporary Culture Lab. There’s plenty of resource there, as Shu Lea have witnessed. If Jesse or anyone want to make a trip to Taiwan, they can be resident artists, and we can meet very frequently, twice a week or something like that.

Michael Connor: That would be cool. That’s a great offer. Thank you again.

Audrey Tang: It’s just my office, and my home is 10 minutes’ walk from the office. [laughs] It’s not too much for me to promise.

Michael Connor: I think that this year, because we have the exhibition, one of the things that I also want to say is that it’s something to keep in mind, but not to take it as a mandate that you have to make a gallery-based project. I think, especially because one of the nice things about Seven on Seven is this open-endedness of it, where it’s not like a specific expectation placed on you.

Michael Connor: Then collaboration can go in various ways. I don’t want you to go into it thinking like, “Oh, we’re definitely going to have a gallery exhibition at the end.”

Audrey Tang: No, if we do something, it will be something interactive. By interactive, I mean the visual mode will probably be part of it. It will, by default, fit into gallery, although it will not be static. Anything that we make, including the mask map that I just show you, are interactive in nature.

Audrey Tang: You’re invited cordially to get a pair of mask and witness within 30-second that it depletes by two. [laughs] That is a symbol of public trust. Anything we make will have probably have that nature. That’s fine. It’s a natural byproduct.

Michael Connor: I mentioned that partly because, for the artists, sometimes there’s more concerns about they have to be so careful about public perceptions about what they present in exhibition.

Michael Connor: For example, if you worked with Shu Lea, whenever she would get something in the gallery, [laughs] there’s always a lot involved in that. It might be possible to realize a full Shu Lea project within the context of just really short-term Seven on Seven collaboration piece, but one should approach it with caution.

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course. Then because it’s so fortunately placed in later in the date, we can have several pilots and see how it goes.

Michael Connor: Great. I’ll take this info and do some more research because I hadn’t seen the Preciado clip in particular, which is great. I think that I don’t have your email address yet.

Audrey Tang: Here is mine. Feel free just to write directly. Also, feel free to use this transcript because I’ll be making a transcript of our conversation we had just now. Feel free to just use it as a context because you get to edit it for 10 days. We don’t publish it raw.

Audrey Tang: Once you finish editing, we usually just publish the same format as the Preciado transcripts that I just posted you, so that this can serve as context to everybody else after this.

Michael Connor: That’s cool. I haven’t thought about that idea. I know you have to give it. This is really just a brief introductory call.

Audrey Tang: Of course. This is just to make sure that the new schedule works for both of us. It turns out it works better for both of us.

Michael Connor: That’s really good to hear.

Audrey Tang: Have a good local time then.

Michael Connor: Thank you. Have a great day.

Audrey Tang: Cheers. Bye.