Alone, Together / Locals, Everywhere
In 2023, the exhibition title of the Venice Biennial seemed to perfectly encompass our socio political environment: Foreigners Everywhere.
It was elegant, political, and true: a pejorative transformed into a rallying cry from a fractured global present.
Like Just Do It, it was also symptomatic in its power to compel, to cultivate likes and shares.
It could have been the tagline for a drop on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok Shop… catching our short attention span in a world of hyper-connectivity, click-commerce and hyper-isolation. Here we are foreign in our own homes (are they even ours any more?) and are strangers on infinite scroll… flooded with images of disposable elsewheres and others, alien even to ourselves.
l’enfer, c’est les autres
Nobody wants this anymore. We have reached a critical mass of despair with the false promise of mass “reach” and hyper-connectivity.
Locals Everywhere is not a denial of this reality.
It is a response to this despair, and a proposal for both an exit and a path forward…
Away from our self-imposed terms of estrangement.
To be local is not a matter of origin.
It’s a matter of attention,
Of intention,
Of how we choose to show up.
To be local is to participate, to be in relation, to stay proximate, whether digitally or physically, through care and affinity, rather than claim.
Locals Everywhere names an interior exodus.
A movement away from the algorithmic public square, away from mass dissemination as goal, and toward something quieter, more intimate. To crave and respect limits. To see and integrate with technology as an extension of intimacy, instead of “using” “it” as a tool for hacking our attention span.
A distributed intimacy.
A post-geographic kinship.
A refusal to define ourselves by displacement, and an invitation to begin again through presence and connection.
This is not utopia. It is something more fragile, and more possible.
A politics of coherence.
A small, glowing warmth.
A shared finitude.
To live here, on this fifth shore, is to relinquish mastery in favor of mutuality. It is to recognize the instability and porousness of identity, not as crisis, but as condition.
To speak with voices that are not ours alone.
Here, authorship dissolves into relation.
Voice becomes encounter.
Intimacy is not proximity… but coherence.
We are alone, together.
We are local, everywhere.
We are not finished.
Signal ist da!
Six years ago in midtown Manhattan, Tan Mu came into her studio everyday to paint some dots. One small set after another, it became No Signal. The painting refers to the familiar image for those of us growing up with bulky CRT televisions: the snowy screen accompanied by the hiss of white noise. It also refers to the signal behind No Signal: a small fraction of that speckled image is in fact influenced by the cosmic microwave background. A whisper of the early universe. Now I’m reminded of the lecture about the first direct observation of gravitational waves I attended at Tsinghua ten years ago, on the remarkable endeavors of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) that confirmed a key prediction in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. That detected wave came from the collision of a pair of black holes. Then there’s the recent news of an AI’s counterintuitive design that seemed like “alien things or AI things” for the physicists at Caltech but could improve the sensitivity of LIGO by an estimated 10-15%, a leap at the sub-proton scale.