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About this episode

Approved! Please do not damage/ this art installation 1. Carbon footprint+1 Cry me a river/ Dig deeper drink more/ Cheers to/ Our sinking land “Cabbage shredded,/ onions beheaded.” 1. bottled garden -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shopping malls, the proliferating hybrid of modern Minotaur in a carnivalesque age of globalization, are temptations we can hardly resist. With the melodic gospel of commercial ads airing in the background, it is hard not to fall in love with this prosperous, harmonious scene that bespeaks world peace. No matter which corner of the globe you live, don’t you worry, there are universal standards to check on types of pasta and sizes of apples to cater to your needs. When you weep, you will never weep alone: there happens to be just these ten brands of tissue paper, neither more nor less for you to choose, waiting around to console your sorrow. The loaded goods in his shopping cart / overlap with mine / which implies some sort of possibility for living together doesn’t it / Isn’t this swell / We eat the same brand of frozen food in different apartments / Doesn’t this indicate some shared personality traits / Isn’t this swell we use the same kind of soap and soap holder / Isn’t this swell we can join our flats together / we join each other as our bodies come together / cause a rise in certain statistics / while make a drop in some other numbers ---Hsia Yü, “Lining up to Pay” In our attempt to mark the so-called individuality through various consuming practices, the act of consumption simultaneously erases all the differences and obscures our individual distinction. We trade other possibilities of living a different life for what appears to be a bargain. Barcode, like our “identity card number” for citizenship, is not only a unique identifier for trade items but also “speaks” a “universal language” that enables unimpeded circulation of commodities in the international market, transcending limits of different linguistic contexts as well as constraints of national boundaries. In our activity of translating the physical objects into digital barcodes, labeling goods under neatly classified categories and putting a price on each and every item, the world has integrated in unity when everybody lines up and forms continuity. After the beep, we pay our bills. What’s the correspondence between the face value on the notes and the barcode on the goods? That’s a question not to be asked. Move on, please! Clerks check and scan the goods in a wink, customers pay in cash or with credit card—no mess, no fuss (as long as the barcode is in place)—we perform the ritual of consumption in perfect coordination, enacting the supreme order of capitalism. The world has then divided into two, and words belong to that invisible half, the half that is on the screen and behind the counter. When the words are not longer in presence, the objects they represent have lost their names. We cannot see the vast logistics market operating behind the barcode mechanism, what remains right before our eyes is numbers. In this field of vision, all material objects we see are priced commodities, and moreover, one by one, people all turn into pieces of goods, tagged with corresponding prices: hourly pay, monthly salary and insurance premium—all summed up equals a person’s social status. To be or not to be is no longer the question in vogue; what defines “somebody” is whether s/he has enough in the pocket to meet all the needs and desires for consumption: I beep, therefore I am. “All those jobs take great efforts, sinews and spirits, consume every bit of existence” as Hsia Yü aptly put in her poem. For this and many other reasons, we imagine the intervention of poetry. By making use of code 128 that is currently prevailing in the consumption and logistics market, we convert our poetic ventures into encrypted codes to generate short free verse in semblance of barcode stickers and then put them on the merchandise on display in grand shopping malls in an attempt to quietly disrupt consumer behavior that appears so ruly that nothing is out of order for people who are lining up to pay. However, through this project of B-poetry, we envision someone waiting in line would witness a verse line or two flashing on the screen when the barcode reader scans our pseudo-barcode that unsettles the original numerical database with poetic text, and hopefully, more people would get involved and come to be aware of a momentary transgression as well as a rupture within the system that not only challenges our logic of daily routine but leads us to reflect upon our being in the instant when our to-be-purchased items go beep! (Translator: Zona Yi-Ping Tsou) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Release Date

  Oct 12, 2009

• Runtime

  02:54