Edward from CPU:798 made a follow-up laoban post to his previous post I noted thinking about the connection between Ullens Dior show's commercial sellout and the eye candy of some of the visuals at Laoban. I think its a good comparison and something most definitely to be critical about for future Laoban Soundsystem events.

In retrospect to the Laoban 1.0 event, Edward stated:

Looking back, the only artist who directly addressed some audience or source outside of the small group, some kind of larger society, with a hope perhaps of making some kind of comment, was Du Qin (a.k.a. D4Q1N), specifically generating a flying array of what I think was the current RMB to USD exchange rate as part of his projection – at any point in time a quite meaningful piece of information for society.

Image by Edward of Du Qin.

Edward has also makes a good point about events in general:

I would go further, though, and give more credit to the event itself as a process which creates some change, some difference. At the end of the day the event can only (re)present what the individuals are doing at any given moment. If no one is engaging through their work, then engagement will not appear. But the evening itself can serve as an engagement. By moving the means of engagement onto the level of the container, this perhaps avoids a situation where participants feel pressured to conform to a particular mode of display, one which has a rather bad reputation for histrionics.

I must admit that myself and Matt Hope often posit soundsystems as something that ignite activity, projecting outward bass and activity in hopes that dynamic emergent activity happens that we never planned for. However, the reality, especially in spaces like galleries with more restrictions rather than a free party, or random event where restrictions are lowered, is that events, such as Laoban are containers rather than expanders or catalysts.

There is a place for both. I'm most interested in the emergent actions at an event. This is a bit naive though since there is always some level of containment and also some level of expansion at any event. Artists and curators spend much of their time trying to understand the world in order to control or channel chaos as a creative act. Hence, the level of containment or expansion, while ignoring or attempting to not control at an event, is usually bound or contained already by others, institutions, or legal systems. Thus, the effective parameter for an event might be to actually structure some type of boundaries for emergent activities and document the activities that happen. In this way, Laoban may be both experimental and interesting.

For Laoban 1.0 we allowed for anyone to mix in, and we tightened the structure of the space towards a traditional proscenium model. For 2009, I think good to make each Laoban events' emergent rules be quite clear up front, and encourage this type of containment vs expansion debate. Come on Edward and others, let's setup some emergent Laoban Soundsystem events for 2009! Shoot me an email and lets expand.