Synesthesia I: Metabolic Fluid
2021-2022
Selected and published in Spring 2023 issue of academic journal Media-N (Vol.19 No.1)
The “Synaesthesia” series (2021-2022), a collaboration between artist Dai Shengjie and media studies scholar Zhou Tinghao, focuses on a small town in Guangdong Province, called Guiyu. Guiyu was once the world‘s largest e-waste recycling town, where processes like “board burning” (burning circuit boards) and “acid washing” (using chemical acids to precipitate non-ferrous metals) were common. The air was long permeated with a pungent, penetrating odor resulting from recycling e-waste, which locals referred to as the “Guiyu smell.” Unknown toxins and chemicals, interacting with the respiratory system and the surrounding environment, were widely dispersed—not only floating in the air but also infiltrating water, breast milk, and children’s blood, becoming integral parts of the environment and the body.
Taking Guiyu as its center case, this work tries to present a prolonged material afterlife of data that is intimately intertwined with the life and livelihood of the local workforce and community, during which desensitized subjects are being created. How do we represent a particular kind of smell or a specific form of olfactory experience? How can we communicate this message with the larger public that has little knowledge of what life is like within a chemically polluted environment? This project seeks to think about these questions in artistic terms, conceiving research-creation as an integral methodology.
Dai‘s artistic work was selected and published as part of media studiesacademic paper “Smellscaping Guiyu” in the Spring 2023 issue of the journal Media-N (Vol.19 No.1).