Situations 7.2 Summer 2014

Biorhythmanography: Screen, Space and Urban Imagination in and

Helen Grace (University of Sydney)

Abstract This paper discusses recent public screen events in Hong Kong and Taipei, as interventions within local communities undergoing major infrastructural & urban developmental changes. In both Hong Kong and Taipei, the Magic Carpet events are tied to residual forms of festival and organic time: the lunar festival, the winter solstice, these ritual forms that remain active within hyper-modern contexts. This paper first contextualizes the significance of the screen as a focus of attention and critical work. After this, it looks at critical theories of urbanism and architecture, focusing on the empirical detail of two projects in Hong Kong and Taipei and the “screen works” that have been produced. The significance of community-based video work is considered within a framework for observing the rhythms—and indeed the bio-rhythms—of urban space, that underpin the research undertaken in these projects to re-envision community space using screen-based means. This argument draws upon and extends Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “rhythmanalysis.” As Lefebvre puts it, “[e]verywhere where there is rhythm, there is measure, which is to say law, calculated and expected obligation, a project.”

Keywords: architecture, mid-Autumn festival, Hong Kong, Taipei, screen culture, rhythmanalysis, urban space

56 Helen Grace

Introduction The imagination of space is always entangled in the re-animation and re-envisioning of a location, tied to a sense of time and duration that is culturally specific. Somehow we hold onto the hope that there are enough benevolent spirits called forth in these processes of imagination and projection to overwhelm the unsettled ghosts that haunt a place. In cinema—and in screen theory—hauntings are present in the very histories and technologies of vision that enable us to dream and that take us outside of ourselves: magic lanterns and projections, visions and phantasmagorias—models, in other words, of thought itself in the modern period.1 The story of this project begins in the desire to engage a community and to re-envision a locality, using the screen as a locus of attention. Over several years researchers had been involved in visualizing urban topologies and measuring the community benefit of major infrastructure developments in Sai Ying Pun, an older area in the Western district of Hong Kong.2 The area is directly in the pathway of two major urban renewal projects—the Island Crest and

Biorhythmanography 57

Yu Lok Lane developments—anew metro line and a new escalator system. After this earlier research revealed how little residents were actually engaged in official “community consultation” processes of change, 3 researchers developed a project to directly draw the community into the process of re-envisioning the neighbourhood, by using video interviews with residents and then amplifying the impact of everyday experience by projecting it on a scale usually reserved for commercial messages.4 School students in the district were trained in video and interview techniques and set about gathering stories and personal testimonies from residents, entering an inter-generational space of enquiry and discovery. The resultant material was edited and the stories were compiled in a community screening, coinciding with the Mid-Autumn Festival.

On the evening of mid-Autumn 2013 (中秋節 - zhongqiujiè),5 a time of festival, of lanterns and magic—of harvest in agricultural societies but now transformed as an urban festival of consumption (of lanterns, food and mooncakes)—Central Street, the main artery through Sai Ying Pun became an open-air cinema, with a ‘magic carpet’ of astro-turf and bean bags, converting the usually empty concrete thoroughfare into a kind of domestic space, dominated by a gigantic crane-mounted screen, reflexively projecting the community onto itself.

58 Helen Grace

The disruption of the usual merchandising content of public screens temporarily reverses the more typical order of values in which urban audiences become the mobile surfaces upon which commercial messages are constantly projected, diminishing the value of ordinary bodies and lives by contrast with the over-inflated images of models and celebrities.6 The idea of the “magic carpet,” a virtual form of “space travel,” connected in some sense to the magic of lanterns, by its association with the popular Lunar Festival has an impermanence and mobility that can be taken to other places, like the spread of citizen empowerment in general. A new project is currently being developed in Tin Shui Wai7—an area of low income public housing in the Western New Territories, called a “city of sadness,” because of the number of high profile cases of tragic deaths, suicides and domestic violence.8 Beyond Hong Kong, exchanges happened between architectural schools,9 following another Magic Carpet event in Taipei, with a public screening of community-based student documentaries, which was held in the of Taipei, in a temple forecourt in

Biorhythmanography 59

December 2013 (on the eve of winter solstice, emphasizing again the organic links of these processes).10 In both locations and on both occasions (Hong Kong and Taipei), the Magic Carpet events are tied to residual forms of festival and organic time: the lunar festival, the winter solstice, these ritual forms that remain active within hyper-modern contexts. This is not to argue ahistorically for some notion of unchanging “tradition.” Every residual ritual form is in fact extensively modernized, attached to consumption processes in new commodity forms, promoted within officially sanctioned ideas of cultural identity and heritage, in developing tourism markets and burgeoning academic fields (tourism and hospitality studies, for example). In spite of this deterministic overlay, communities nonetheless manage to squeeze out of these occasions meanings that evade the complete capture of monetizable opportunities, inventing, within these processes, new techniques for the production of space. Do events like this really make any difference? This paper explores what is at stake in attempting such projects, first, by contextualizing the significance of the screen as a focus of attention and critical work; secondly, by looking at critical theories of urbanism and architecture; thirdly, by focusing on the empirical detail of two projects in Hong Kong and Taipei and the “screen works” that have been produced. Finally, the significance of community-based video work is considered within a framework for observing the rhythms—and indeed the bio- rhythms—of urban space, that underpin the research undertaken in these projects to re-envision community space using screen-based means. This argument draws upon and extends Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “rhythmanalysis.”11 As Lefebvre puts it, “Everywhere where there is rhythm, there is measure, which is to say law, calculated and expected obligation, a project.”12

Screens Long before cinema, the screen as architectonic form and image- bearing surface, dividing the visual field, performatively organized

60 Helen Grace

space and meaning in both art and in the classical Chinese domestic interior.13 Popular cultural forms of shadow play behind screens, performed by traveling troupes,14 suggest that the kind of modern imagination associated with cinema has many precursors globally. Cinema, however, adds another dimension to this play of shields and filters, electrifying the firefly of fleeting apparitions.15 When we erect a large screen in a public place, to engage a community, inviting residents to see themselves amplified, we are drawing on this long line of associations. This is also evident in a greater engagement with the experience of the screen in public space, and a more detailed exploration of the screen’s incorporation within everyday life in recent research. 16 Francesco Cassetti suggests that the nature of the screen has been transformed: he suggests that screens are no longer surfaces where reality is relived but rather they have become transit hubs for a more general circulation of images in social space.17

Situations Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle’s savage attack on modern urbanism, might be speaking precisely of the kinds of interventions undertaken in this research when he criticizes a particular tendency in spectacular culture that “seeks to remake, by means of “team projects,” a complex neo-artistic environment made up of decomposed elements: notably in urbanism’s attempts to integrate artistic debris or esthetico-technical hybrids.”18 He regards this aspect of spectacle to be “the one most closely linked to the repressive practice of the general organization of society” and dismisses interventions of the kind being attempted here as mere “expression,” within the “spectacular pseudo-culture” of capitalism’s general projection “to recapture the fragmented worker as a “personality well integrated in the group.’’” He specifically associates this tendency with the work of 1950s American sociologists, naming Riesman and Whyte among the culprits of this shift.19 The outcome is, for him, inevitable: “[i]t is the same project everywhere: a restructuring

Biorhythmanography 61

without community.”20 He snarls again at us when he seems to dismiss our feeble efforts to enter into a festival mood, dismissing all such attempts as futile in the era of the spectacle and of spectacular time, replacing, for him, some more authentic organic experience:

The epoch which displays its time to itself as essentially the sudden return of multiple festivities is also an epoch without festivals. What was, in cyclical time, the moment of a community’s participation in the luxurious expenditure of life is impossible for the society without community or luxury. When its vulgarized pseudo-festivals, parodies of the dialogue and the gift, incite a surplus of economic expenditure, they lead only to deception always compensated by the promise of a new deception. In the spectacle, the lower the use value of modern survival-time, the more highly it is exalted. The reality of time has been replaced by the advertisement of time.21

When we turn our attention to the ways in which urban screen cultures in Asia are rapidly transforming the everyday processes by which location/place, mobility/speed, and body/subjectivity are constituted, the earlier context of Situationism presents itself—in the very task of writing for a journal called Situations, where an explicit statement/manifesto demands response: “[f]or us culture is not so much a matter of taking positions as of facing the ever-challenging situations.”22 So this is in itself one way of speaking with—and back to—Debord, one of the original Situationists, who nonetheless takes such strong positions that give us no room to move—especially when we are in spaces we know to be moving in myriad ways. Because our project is also engaged with architecture, we find the history of architecture likewise offers us little hope, if we take on board, for example, Manfredo Tafuri’s influential post-war critique of architecture’s inability to change anything, and its resultant retreat into formalism (“pure architecture,” “form without Utopia”), “sublime uselessness.”23

62 Helen Grace

This kind of bleakness is not of much help to those of us living in and thinking about Asian cities where “the society of the spectacle” is not simply an inauthentic aspect of contemporary reality, a degraded form of human life, and where “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”24 Rather, spectacle and reality are not so easily opposed in the experience of spectacularised surfaces alongside the immediacy and ubiquity of production processes both organic and industrial. Here, life continues to be lived directly and simultaneously to exist as a representation, allowing space to be affectively mapped and bodies located through and within technologies. Identities and desires are formed in the interstitial zones of an always ‘screened’ experience, moving between territories of belonging and non-belonging and occupying places where movement and mobility are only part of the story. One of the most striking discoveries of the research that underpins the work being discussed here is in fact the significance of immobility: of remarkably resilient and long- standing communities within zones of impermanence—of hastily assembled housing that has remained in one place for perhaps two whole generations, in spite of the constant risk that developmental projects will demolish it. This, for us, especially seems the case in research carried out in Hong Kong and Taipei, where substantially neglected urban areas exist in spite of the general image of each city as a globalized spectacle of over-development. Within these areas, very strongly connected communities form and endure, developing urban space autonomously from the bottom up and constituting the ur-form of ‘networked cities’—akin to what Saskia Sassen has called “Open Source Urbanism.”25 Kang Min Jay discusses an especially rich example of persistent and creative spatial occupation in his discussion of the improvised architecture he calls “informal urbanism.”26 Focusing on a particular apartment building in Nanjichang (南機場 South Airport), an area of Taipei, named after a military airstrip used by the Japanese during the Occupation, which became a location for veterans and public housing communities and a night market in the

Biorhythmanography 63

post-war period, Kang gives a wonderful account of an apartment that starts out as a small, 26.4 square metre unit for a poor, single man in 1962. As life is lived, he marries and has a family, remaining in this space and gradually expanding it by encroaching on an under-utilised public area and spreading into the air surrounding the unit. Using cheap materials, and continually subdividing the existing space, he eventually manages to create a space of 105.6 square metres, accommodating five people—and demonstrating the intricacies of producing space in a highly improvised way. Above all, this demonstrates that space is a kind of renewable resource—that it is produced.27 In looking for pattern and rhythm in these spaces we discover the intricacies of improvised processes: what might be called “hacking the city.”28 Extremely rich and complex subsistence economies operate within the fissures of neglect, hidden by the very fetishistic gloss of development. In the excess of translucent and reflective surfaces, a feedback loop is set up, rendering opaque or screening out the persistent everyday realities that enable the very possibility of development—invisible labour, existing as another spectral presence, haunting the space of the city, appearing fleetingly in hastily noticed glimpses flashing by. So to move forward, it is much more helpful to turn to a figure who was a key influence on Situationism and who also breaks with it: Lefebvre, who himself turns to architecture as a way forward—and in particular towards an architecture of enjoyment.29 By “architecture,” Lefebvre doesn’t mean “the prestigious art of erecting monuments,” nor the architect’s role in aiding construction, but rather the production of space at a more basic level, involving something more akin to urban design (furniture, gardens, parks). He insists on isolation from larger scale urban planning and land-use planning from those who control such processes arguing that this isolation is:30

the only way forward toward clear thinking, the only way to avoid the incessant repetition of the idea that there is nothing

64 Helen Grace

to be done, nothing to be thought, because everything is “blocked,” because “capitalism” rules and co-opts everything, because the “mode of production” exists as system and totality, to be rejected or accepted in accordance with the principle of “all or nothing.”31

To succumb to an “all or nothing” demand, based on the belief that “nothing can be done” because of the nature of capitalism involved, to Lefebvre’s way of thinking, “the annihilation of thought—and hence of action.” His “architecture of enjoyment” actively seeks out imperfect realizations of urban renewal: proletarian housing rather than bourgeois apartments because it is only in such spaces—in their very imperfection—that social space has a place. The bourgeois apartment privatizes social space, replacing the city:

A bar is installed to simulate the expansive sociability and conviviality of public places. The kitchen mimics the grocery store, the dining room replaces the restaurant …32

On the other hand, social housing by virtue of its very spatial limitations must interact with the environment, must seek out “facilities” external to domestic space—more reminiscent of cities like Hong Kong and Taipei where domestic space is highly constrained and street life is, in a restricted way, “domesticated” by extension:

There is no connection with enjoyment other than in and through external space, which remains one of social appropriation, even if that appropriation is realized only in terms of the restrictive norms and constraints of the existing mode of production.33

The “social appropriation” achieved over time in older neighbourhoods of Hong Kong, such as Sai Ying Pun, is testimony to the forms of resistance—an urbanism from below—that make these spaces livable, in a city that initially exists as a militarized “free port,”

Biorhythmanography 65

established by the British to undercut the tea price by trading opium into China.

Mapping, Imaging, Screening

66 Helen Grace

The colonial city is mapped from above, names imposed to provide an overview ordering occupation itself: Sai Ying Pun (西營盤) West Camp, a place of military enclosure, the earliest in Hong Kong, established in 1841, during the First Opium War. With the garrison comes the surveyor, laying a grid of streets, numerically listed: First, Second, Third St., downhill from High St., below which the Chinese are required to live, the colonisers in the space above, retaining the cleaner air and the power of oversight. Centre St., flowing steeply to the harbour, intersects the straight lines of numbered streets. It is also the first sewer.34 The shadow of the past survives in the very shaping of the streetscape that still remains—but the streets are also intersected by a frequently hidden and always informal labyrinth of alleys that appropriates the territory from below. Rapid industrial growth in the post-war period produces ‘blighted residential areas’, where plastics factories, printeries and other small businesses dissolve the division between factory and domestic space; and, by 1964, the Western District is scheduled for “Urban Renewal.”35

Biorhythmanography 67

When high school students arrive 50 years later to interview residents for the Magic Carpet project, everything has changed and yet, in a sense, nothing is different, in spite of the constant attention of planning authorities and developers. The students remap the space in a more psychogeographic way, drifting through the streets and alleys, discovering pocket parks and devising ways of measuring activity in specific places. They divide the territory into zones of movement and particular space types, where people gather and their provisional map of encounters looks like this:

Space Type Interviewee Escalator Workers on the escalator; hawkers along Centre St; construction workers on Centre St; people at work; pedestrians on Centre St &/or escalator. Market Ashman at Centre St Market; woman grocer; Butcher; shop owner at Sai Ying Pun Market; shop owner at Shek Tong Tsui Market; seafood store owner. School Janitor; teacher; student; headmaster; university student. Transport Drivers; minibus driver. Restaurant Owner of Hung-hing Cha ChaanTeng (Teashop); staff of Ching-hing butcher; staff of Yun-fat Cha ChaanTeng; owner of Chan See Kee Restaurant; owner of Yung-kee Congee shop; staff of Say-Gwai Cha ChaanTeng; staff of Hana Sushi; staff/boss of Yee-fat Cha ChaanTeng; staff of Sister Wah; staff/boss Ming Fat Cha ChaanTeng; staff of Mon Wah Yong Kitchen; owner of Congee Shop adjacent to snack shop; owner of Tung-fong Cha ChaanTeng; owner of Noodle Shop opposite Sun Po Ma. Shops (Specific) Third St Kwan HingKee; cashier of Chinese dessert shop; staff of Methadone clinic; staff of On & On; staff of Ying- wah Barber Shop; owner of Hok-yuen Photocopying; owner of Photo Developing Shop on Western St; staff of Wing-wo Pharmacy; staff of Hop-hing Store; owner of Yue-tak Book Store; owner of Hung-sing Store; staff at Dymocks; staff of Wing Kee Mechanicals; member of Lili Seafood Shop; staff

68 Helen Grace

of Kwok Kwong Book Store; owner of florist next to Sun Po Ma; Toy Shop; Egg Roll Shop. Shops Owner of shop; owner of Congee Shop; owner/boss of (General) Chain Store; owner/boss of grocery; staff of Takeaway; owner of Dried Food Shop; staff of Hotel; finer; shop assistant (7-11/Circle K); Residents Resident; old resident; grassroots resident; middle class resident; young resident; parent/housewife picking up primary school kids; domestic helper. Others Tourist; member of district council; history scholar; people coming out from the public toilet; street sweeper.

Not everyone wants to or has time to talk to them, to answer their inquiring questions, but gradually they become sensitive to the longevity and fragility of the place that is changing before their eyes (old businesses disappear as they work and walk in the district) and slow conversations occur.

36-year-old Wing Wo Pharmacy on High Street, closed down, August 31, 2013

Biorhythmanography 69

They find people like Mrs Yan, now 91, a grocery store owner for 60 years, who tells them she likes Sai Ying Pun simply “because I’m used to it.”36 Mr Choi, a toyshop owner has also been living in the area for 60 years, who describes the space of Water St at an earlier time, when it was a market through the day and at night a daipai dong (a series of open air restaurants) and “working class night spot.” He has his own ideas of how success—and a society that is “a stable, prosperous community, with less grievance”—can be achieved:

The saying that “society is fair” is a lie. It’s all up to you … what you do, what you strive for, how much work you do. If you’ve done enough, you can guarantee a good future.37

Elsie, originally a Filipina domestic worker, now married to a Chinese man and working in a convenience store is more philosophical about the general accountancy of life:

Everybody of course wants to improve; I myself is dreaming of improvement of my life; everybody, we are dreaming to improve our life. But if you cannot reach that dream, what can you do? You have to be satisfied with (what) you’ve been given. That is what my life is—because I cannot just go out and steal something because I want to be rich. Or I cannot go to the casino in Macau and gamble because I don’t have the money to gamble. I cannot also be going every Tuesday, every Thursday to buy a Mark 6 (lottery ticket) because if I’m aiming to win, I might change my life. But the more I aim for that, the more I pay my $40, that is a waste because I did not have every number. I should have buy bread and sugar for my coffee.38

The students ask questions and record their conversations, along with the visual and aural ambience of Sai Ying Pun, building a visual description that is overlain with small stories of space. The stories reveal the repetitions of the everyday, the commonalities and

70 Helen Grace

differences between experiences, the patterns that emerge in the intersections of different time frames: the temporality of labour and economics, measured in clock-time and hourly rates, in opening and closing hours, cosmic temporalities, measured in seasons and marked by lunar and solar festivals; organic temporalities of human life and generational growth and decline. There are the imposing temporalities of infrastructure development itself, organized frequently to overwhelm the provisional lives of community residents: the systems it requires, the time measured in years in moving between (and beyond) structures of law and legislation, planning authorities, appeals courts etc.39 For Lefebvre, the everyday “establishes itself, creating hourly demands, systems of transport, in short, its repetitive organization.”40 It is this insistence of the everyday that is attended to here, in making visible the ordinary, in amplifying it on a large screen in public space. More importantly, in acknowledging the rhythms, repetitions and patterns of the everyday, in foregrounding the importance of the “small details” in the face of overwhelming pressures of infrastructure development (and the operation of “extrastatecraft”) on the lives of residents, a different measure or scale needs to be acknowledged: the scale of that which is the ‘least rational in human being: the lived, the carnal, the body’41, discounted in the hyper-inflation of economic values and subject to the operations of a generalised biopower.42 Rhythm, thus presents itself as time, regulated by rational laws but oscillating in contact with the body and experience. The rhythmic material gathered in the intergenerational interaction of the Magic Carpet Project is edited into concise clips, mostly five or six minutes. These short-form pieces become a feature length work, projected in the “cinematic space” of Centre St, sloping downwards, like a racked movie theatre. Part of the re-envisioning of space involves re-imagining the physical terrain as having analogous connexions with other forms and experiences that are transformative. On a festival night of luminescent lanterns, the open-air cinematic space on an astro-turf “magic carpet,” domesticated by bean bags, invites relaxation in a space that is normally a thoroughfare of busy passers-by, slows down time temporarily. The screen lights up with

Biorhythmanography 71

images not usually seen on this scale, and we encounter again the invention of cinema and its democratisation of culture in the very surfaces upon which the image plays. As Béla Balázs reminds us in an early appreciation of cinema’s power:

Culture does not just refer to the beautiful poses of statues in the art galleries, but to the gait and the everyday gestures of people in the street or at their work. Culture means the penetration of the ordinary material of life by the human spirit ...43

To up-scale the ordinary is to transform it, to shift from “the little things of life” of which people speak endlessly (but no-one listens) to the “larger contours” of the big picture. Balázs tells us that these are “mainly the result of the insensitivity and sloppiness with which we ignore the little things and blur their outlines. The abstract picture of the big things of life arises mainly from our myopia.”44 If we can say that memory is passively preserved within a locality, it requires a new geography of the senses to activate it; and something of this was involved in the Magic Carpet project and in the creativity of its motivation. The project was enabled under a university Knowledge Transfer Fun. This is in itself a remarkable aspect of the undertaking, one in which knowledge transfer is regarded as the “third mission” of higher education, beyond teaching and research, within an innovative policy framework. Gaps between what a policy statement dreams of and what is achieved are usually great. Nonetheless, it is a quite unusual moment in higher education globally to find a place where talk of “Social Care” and “Nurturing the Knowledge Transfer Spirit and Capacity” empowers school students with ethnographic and media skills, encouraging the transfer of deeply embedded social knowledge and intangible heritage between generations. In this context “knowledge transfer” is understood in a more cultural/communal way, having an emphatically social and intergenerational dimension, rather than a

72 Helen Grace

primarily market-driven one, determined within “marketizeable” intellectual property regimes. On the street, the students encounter the everyday ways in which residents are at the mercy of their circumstances—and recognize that they have a clear analysis of economic reality and power in the city (“We never know. It’s all uncertain. So we can only continue to work and leave it up to fate … It’s all about turning an old district into a new one. And old shops will be eliminated in the future … It’s not really up to us. It’s up to the rent”).45 On the screen these voices are amplified; a sense of community exists in a festive collective viewing. Although the public screening is a highly visible event and its staging brings extensive publicity to the exercise, it is a decidedly ephemeral aspect of the overall project. The real force of the “knowledge transfer” is dispersed much more widely across small screens: a Facebook group, which follows the project’s progress;46 a flickr account, where the process is archived, recording the intensities of exchange and transfer;47 a YouTube channel, where videos are uploaded, updated, reposted;48 and a dedicated website that can structure and organize the material more formally. Together, the ensemble/assemblage of elements demonstrates precisely what Francesco Cassetti has in mind when he speaks of screens as being not so much spaces for reliving reality but as transit hubs within social space, that put images into general circulation.49 The dissemination of images between and across myriad screens, large and small places, with the screen itself at the centre of attention: however, fleeting attention actually is in the constant flow of images, surfaces and bodies within the zones of the city. But a key contradiction of this ephemerality of flows is a resilient solidity—of people and spaces remaining in place over generations (the 91 year-old shopkeeper who has been here for 60 years; the toy- shop owner who has lived his entire life in the area; the 39 year-old pharmacy whose disappearance is noted in the research; the Filipina domestic worker who has been settled in the district for more than twenty years and is now a “permanent resident”)—each engaged in a kind of rhythmic occupation of the area. The persistence and tenacity

Biorhythmanography 73

with which people remain in seemingly temporary places registers historical experience of traumatic displacement, within living memory;50 but memory is also mediated by nostalgia in the cinematic representations of historical experience.51 The Magic Carpet project relates directly to the cinematic mediation of the city, gathering contemporary stories and eye-witness accounts, animating the space at street level where everyday life is most dynamic. This is in spite of the planning habit in this particular city of moving bodies from the street, and placing them on pedestrian footbridges so that the flow of vehicular traffic will not be impeded.52 The imaginative potential of a screen-based method of engaging communities also fed into regional exchange, spreading to Taipei. Here, a group of professors and students in the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National University have developed a version of the Magic Carpet for use with their work in Wanhua (萬華 區), Taipei’s oldest district—and a territory already re-imagined in cinema.53 The better known Xim ending, an area in northern Wanhua, and the focus of youth subculture, fashion and tourism (the Harajuku of Taipei) possesses the pedestrianized streets and large public screens that typify the dynamic Asian city. The location frequently serves as the global image of Taipei. The much poorer and neglected southern part lies in the shadow of these images of the city, with development plans to convert it into another Ximending. In autumn 2013, the Graduate Institute focused its studio practicum on the Wanhua community, at a time of heightened awareness and criticism of state and city government redevelopment schemes. Student engagement in these communities had intensified around the forced demolition of the Wang Family house in Taipei’s Shilin District in March 2012 to make way for a redevelopment scheme and hundreds of students had occupied the site in the pathway of the bulldozers.54 The demolition site was occupied for months, with ongoing protests.55 Further protests and community activism then occurred around the demolition of the Huaguang community, an area of ‘informal urbanism’ close to the centre of Taipei.56

74 Helen Grace

Advised by documentary filmmakers, students undertook small immersive or “sensory ethnographic” projects, based within the community, recording everyday processes. These were self-directed projects, but certain rhythms and patterns emerged in the process, and the final works reflected the primary concerns of the residents: food, clothing, housing—in other words, biopolitical necessity or how to survive. From an atmospheric narrative of the garment district in Wanhua,57 to the everyday gestures of running an old rice shop;58 from the precise and remarkable micro-economic accounting of life in the words of a homeless man,59 to local food specialties,60 and an anti- sentimental take on housing,61 (“[p]eople get old, you get old, the houses also get old”), the short works embrace the fine details of locality, discovering the economic under-currents beneath the surface, such as in a very fine noir-like revelation of bean sprout manufacture, in an alley well known to locals.62 In December 2013, on the eve of the Winter Solstice (Dongzhi 冬 至), a public screen was installed in the forecourt of South Wanhua’s Guang Zhao Temple (廣照宮)63 for the projection of the works, in a mini-festival/“Magic Carpet” event that incorporated traditional seasonal food, extending community links that have since been maintained. Further screenings are still occurring in the newly established Wanhua Story House in Youth Park and a temple forecourt.64 In the background of this community activism is the more recent Sunflower Movement in Taiwan, and the student and activist occupation of the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s Parliament,65 events which have inspired students and in which social media have been crucial, for mobilization as well as for the circulation and sharing of images on small screens. Scalar contrasts of small events on large screens and large events on small screens present a scene of oscillating values, of the dissolution of clear lines of delineation between public and private and of a blurring between amateur and professional practice. Most relevant for our purposes here, these scalar contrasts also demonstrate the centrality of the screen as itself a form of public space, drawing attention to the increasingly mediated space of the everyday. A means

Biorhythmanography 75

of observing and witnessing that has not previously existed on this scale has now become ubiquitous; a specific relation to the image on the screen is now a core aspect of everyday experience. This has particular intensities in East Asia, where device manufacture is located and where, in different places, the restrictions on image flow in the ‘post-war’ period have resulted in a sense of freedom in the more recent excess of image proliferation enabled by devices. The filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke has spoken of the concept of an “image life” that now exists, replacing a kind of ‘image deprivation’ in China, prior to 1979:

There was a paucity in visual experience. Post 1949, only official studios were allowed to make films, and cinema became an art form monopolized by the Government. Our long separation from film made us forget that cinematic expression was our right too. With DV, the Chinese began to see the world through the viewfinder. What DV gave us was not just a new form of expression; it was a return of a right ... 66

This experience of restricted access to images is not limited to but is also an aspect of the constraints on expression in Taiwan, and, to a different extent, in Korea, and in Singapore in the same period. When “image-life” begins, in the form of ubiquitous user- created content, a much broader range of experience becomes perceptible, requiring a new exercise of aesthetic judgment that can recognize what has appeared, not in terms of a contemporary canon and its restrictive boundaries, located largely in museums, galleries and art fairs but rather in terms of a “general aesthesia” that circulates between screens in a form of “private publicity,” exhibiting the everyday as an image. In using screen-based works as part of a process of re-envisioning communities, drawing upon residents’ experience, the challenge for researchers is also to be themselves aware of what has been produced, to pay attention to the fine detail of local knowledge as a sphere of innovation that can help to transform locations. The purpose of these

76 Helen Grace

exercises is not to simply “give voice” to residents in a form of expression smoothing the way for development. It is easy to produce community “support,” through attention to the particular in its exoticism: a kind of touristic gaze, directed outwards. The projects being undertaken here are instead directed inwards, to the residents themselves. Non-actors therefore become actors, performing themselves, awaiting the direction to act, temporarily distracted from their actual labour, now creatively transformed into an image. This image, in its observation of the obviousness of life, is then reflected back to the residents—these performers of the everyday—so that they become initially distanced from their own reality, watching it as if watching a movie. We can say that this tendency of the image to abstract experience is itself a type of new experience because of its ubiquity— and the screen is the primary zone or territory where it is placed. Above all, it is rhythm that structures this observation of the everyday within a kind of feedback loop, located at the site of its occurrence: the repetitive regularities of daily life that may be noticed or not noticed. To pay special attention to these rhythms and repetitions is to encounter a diversity of ethical frameworks within the everyday and to acknowledge the ways in which a philosophy of living, as well as an aesthetic/affective structure of response exists in spheres where it is assumed such intensities do not matter to people concerned only with basic survival. This is the attitude that will override the wishes of populations in the interests of a ‘greater good’ that usually coincides with profit and propertied interests. Although Lefebvre’s late work on rhythmanalysis was unfinished— and perhaps remains more suggestive than developed, building on the germ of ideas that first surfaces in Lucio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos and Gaston Bachelard—this work, placing rhythm at the centre of a method, persists as a tantalisingly evocative way of approaching the richness of community life.67 It surfaces here as image, disrupting the insistence of commercial image-bearing surfaces. We can add to the concept by comparing it with another concept: that of Michel Foucault’s biopower. 68 Although there is not the space in this

Biorhythmanography 77

descriptive account of urban imaginaries to develop the contrasts between a diffuse notion of biopower and an even more diffuse notion of rhythmanalysis as a method for discovering the order of the everyday, we can tentatively suggest that if the operations of biopower function in a top-down kind of way, then rhythmanalysis works from the bottom up, requiring an engagement with the particularities of quotidian experience, rather than its generalities (for example, “Big Data”). Biopower—and biopolitics—as a knowledge-power operation functions in diffuse ways. It includes those processes in which the life course, its processes and rhythms become central to power. Operating across institutions and practices, it is concerned to produce norms of living, through which, for example, deviancy can be identified, though not necessarily acted upon. This is because these power dynamics are less concerned with the administration of individuals, and more with the management of the masses: the physical and political bodies of the population. It is more concerned with seeking the “control of life and the biological processes of man as species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined but regularized.”69 In contrast, rhythmanalysis does not seek to regularize in order to control but rather more simply to identify regularities in their endless diversity, as a means of recognizing the persistence of organic time, precisely against the efforts of controlling and displacing with the rationalities of standardisation, mathematical or industrial time. When we are engaged in the processes of bringing together generations within communities as a part of re-envisioning these locations and of observing the rhythms of spaces and bodies, it seems clear that organic rhythms hold greater fascination than do industrial or infrastructural rhythms. When someone speaks, describing their life, reflecting on changes over time, a dynamic energy is released, a biorhythmic quality that is magnified when this image appears on a public screen. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, there is nothing that remains boring or mouhliuh (無聊)! Let us call the method that we are engaged in here biorhythmanalysis, a technique of observation drawing upon the rhythms and repetitions of the everyday,

78 Helen Grace

intensifying or enlarging them through screens large and small, in public and in private. Urban development processes endlessly submerge the community “spirit” intensely felt by residents. The counter-discourse that everyday life offers in resisting the logic of profit-oriented development is easily silenced and crushed, unless mobilized in inter-generational knowledge transfer. In the two cases discussed here, further mobilisation is evident both in the extension of the Magic Carpet project into Tin Shui Wai and in the ongoing community participation of students in Taipei. This is true both at the micro-level (for example, building a community kitchen) and at the macro-level (the active participation in the Sunflower Movement/Occupation). In emphasis- ing the biorhythmic character of story gathering and image projection, the productive nature of knowledge-power relations is highlighted. As Lefebvre so well understood in positing an architecture of enjoyment, there must be a space beyond the impasse of “nothing can be done” in the face of capital’s powerful force or almost inexorable fate—even if it is simply to honour the ways in which communities seem to ignore completely the forces that ostensibly control them, always finding ways of evading the operations of regulative biopower. It might simply be naïve—a naiveté that is necessary—but we remember the words of a poetic thinker: “in order to know or use time well, we must activate the rhythm of creation and destruction, of work and repose.”70

Notes 1 For historical accounts, see Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus” in The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century, eds. Andre Gaudreault, Catherine Russell, and Pierre Veronneau (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 2004), 31-44; Koen Vermeir, “The Magic of the Magic Lantern (1660-1700): On Analogical Demonstration and the Visualization of the Invisible,” British Society for the History of Science 38, no. 2 (2005): 127-59; Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 26-61. For work on Hong Kong cinema, see

Biorhythmanography 79

especially Esther M. K. Cheung, Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009). See also Wei Ping (curator), Haunted Screen: Hong Kong Ghost Films, Film Programmes Office, Leisure and Cultural Services Dept, Hong Kong, November, 2012. 2 For an account of the research, see Hendrik Tieben, Essy Baniassad, Sujata Govada, and Helen Grace, “Measuring Community Benefit in Public Space Transformation: A Case Study of Centre Street, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong” (presentation, 19th International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF): New Urban Configurations, TU Delft, The Netherlands, October 16-19, 2012); project funding for this work was enabled by Hong Kong Research Grants Council, General Research Fund Project No 454911 (Earmarked Fund for Knowledge Transfer, University Grants Committee). 3 And indeed it has been argued that cynicism is a feature of the response to official community engagement processes in Hong Kong, post 1997. See Catherine C. H. Chiu, “Cynicism about Community Engagement in Hong Kong,” Sociological Spectrum 25, no. 4 (2005): 447-67. 4 “Magic Carpet: Re-envisioning Community Space in Sai Ying Pun” initiated by School of Architecture and School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013; the project team consists of Hendrik Tieben, Colin Fournier, Anthony Fung, Yip Kai-chun with students of BSSc in Urban Studies & M.Sc. in Urban Design, School of Architecture; Project Partners: King’s College and The Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage (CACHe). The project draws on the background research provided by “Measuring Community Benefit in Public Space Transformation in Older Urban Districts.” 5 September 19, 2013—the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, when there is a full moon (and, to underline the cosmic nature of time and the event, this impermanent “Magic Carpet” projection/installation took place just a day before the strongest typhoon of the year lashed Hong Kong, closing down the city and killing 25 people as it made landfall on the Chinese coast. See “Typhoon Usagi: Severe storm lashes Hong Kong,” South China Morning Post, September 22, 2013, accessed April 15, 2014, http://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1315301/typhoon-usagi-severe-storm-lashes-hong-kong. For a general descriptive account of mid-autumn festival in Hong Kong, see Kin Wai Michael Siu, “Lanterns of the mid-autumn festival: A reflection of Hong Kong cultural change,” Journal of Popular Culture 33, no 2 (1999): 67-86. 6 Images of the mid-autumn screening can be seen on the Magic Carpet website: http://www.magiccarpet.hk/saiyingpun/with a short video summary:

80 Helen Grace

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax23ISBCDCI&list=TLY4FXrzEtW- Cz7eLeSTXTmI6tpYxWgWtL; details of the project development are available on a Facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/MagicCarpetHK and video clips are viewable on a YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/MagicCarpetHK; all these sites were accessed April 15, 2014. 7 For a selection of images of the project under development, see https://www.flickr.com/photos/magicarpet-hongkong/13218562954/in/set- 72157642486560575/, accessed July 14, 2014. 8 Miranda Yeung, “Tin Shui Wai cries out for help and support,” South China Morning Post, October 22, 2007, accessed July 12, 2014, http://www.scmp.com/article/612545/tin-shui-wai-cries-out-help-and-support. Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui On-Wah 許鞍華 focuses on the area in two feature films, The Way We Are (天水圍的日與夜) and Night and Fog (天水圍的夜與霧). 9 Collaboration was initiated between Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Architecture and National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, leading to 雙城對話：台北 x 香港 /Urban Dialogue: Taipei x Hong Kong, a series of forums, workshops and screenings, bringing together social activists, filmmakers, artists, architects, educators, scholars, urban planners/designers and policymakers from Taipei and Hong Kong, held in Hong Kong in February 2014. Joint presentations were also exhibited at the 2013 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\ Architecture in its Hong Kong iteration at Kwun Tong Ferry Pier, December 11 2013-February 28, 2014 with the theme “Beyond the Urban Edge: The Ideal City?” This title extended the international Biennale’s main theme on the ‘Urban Border’ that had begun in Shenzhen a week earlier. For an English summary, see: http://en.szhkbiennale.org/News/newsDe.aspx?id=10000526, accessed April 15, 2014. 10 For extensive documentation of the screening, and the works themselves, see http://ntubp2013.blogspot.com.au, accessed April 15, 2014. 11 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004). 12 Ibid., 8. 13 The Chinese terms for the screen—píng 屏 and 障 zhàng—both mean shield (n), to shield (v), or to block; to hinder; to obstruct. For one of the richest accounts of the cultural and spatial significance of screens see Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). For an earlier historical discussion, see Michael Sullivan, “Notes on Early Chinese Screen Painting,” ArtibusAsiae 27, no. 3 (1965): 239-64.

Biorhythmanography 81

14 Fan Pen Li Chen, 陳凡平, “The Temple of Guanyin: A Chinese Shadow Play,” Asian Theatre Journal 16, no. 1 (1999): 60-106; see also Fan Pen Li Chen, “Shadow Theaters of the World,” Asian Folklore Studies 62, no. 1, (2003): 25-64 and Fan Pen Li Chen, Visions for the Masses: Chinese Shadow Plays from Shaanxi and Shanxi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2004). 15 The Chinese word for cinema: diànyĭng 電影, “electric shadow(s).” 16 See, for example, Scott McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (London: Theory Culture and Society/Sage, 2008). And more recently, Chris Berry, Janet Harbord, Rachel O. Moore, eds., Public Space, Media Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See also Helen Grace, Culture, Aesthetics and Affect in Ubiquitous Media: The Prosaic Image (London: Routledge, 2014). 17 Francesco Cassetti, “What is a screen nowadays?” in Public Space, Media Space, eds. Chris Berry, Janet Harbord, and Rachel O. Moore (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17. 18 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Chicago: Detroit, Black and Red, 1977), par. 193. 19 Debord has in mind the popular sociology of David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Reuel Denney, eds., The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950) and William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956). As it happens, Whyte’s useful visualisation methods, outlined in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 1980) influenced our approach to mapping Hong Kong pocket parks and public space. 20 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, par. 193. 21 Ibid., par. 154. 22 See http://web.yonsei.ac.kr/bk21/Manifesto.htm, accessed July 7, 2014. 23 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT Press, 1976), ix. 24 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1. 25 Saskia Sassen, “Open Source Urbanism,” Domus, 2011, accessed April 10, 2014, https://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/2011/06/29/open-source-urbanism.html. 26 Kang Min Jay, “Informal Urbanism from Inside-Out: Internalizing Taipei Experiences of Informality,” in The New Urban Question—Urbanism beyond Neo- Liberalism, 4th International Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFoU) Conference Proceedings, Amsterdam/Delft, 2009, accessed April 15, 2014, http://newurbanquestion.ifou.org/proceedings/3%20The%20Urbanized%20Society

82 Helen Grace

/full%20papers/B009_KANG_Min%20Jay_Informal%20Urbanism%20from%20Insi de%20Out.pdf. 27 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 28See Sabine Maria Schmidt, ed., Hacking the City-Interventions in Urban and Communicative Spaces (Essen: Museum Folkwang, 2011). 29 See Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, ed. Lukasz Stanek, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2014). 30 In words that might almost be directed at Debord. 31 Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, 4. 32 Ibid., 5. 33 Ibid. 34 For more detailed background of the area, see Tieben et al, “Measuring Community Benefit in Public Space Transformation.” 35 Lai Chuen-Yan, “Small Industries in Hong Kong: Problems of Relocation Associated with Urban Renewal,” The Town Planning Review 44, no. 2 (1973): 135- 46. 36http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJsQYIQUdEc&list=UUwDLOoHkm VPzkPK4IW9bgn, accessed May 15, 2014. 37http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKCLZa8TjvY&list=UUwDLOoHkmVPz kPK4IW9bgn,accessed May 15, 2014. 38http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkUPWHTHFA, accessed May 15, 2014. 39 Architect Keller Easterling suggests that global infrastructure development has itself displaced law, diplomacy and national legislative structures, occupying a sphere of “extrastatecraft,” that may involve the use of conventional statecraft and war as camouflage for developments that take place outside of and in excess of “proper political channels.” See Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014). See also: http://extrastatecraft.net/About, a design project initiated by Easterling in the Design Department of Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, accessed May 15, 2014. 40 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 7. 41 Ibid., 9. 42 On the concept of biopower, see Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France1977-1978, ed. Michel Senellary, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), 20. 43Béla Balázs, “Visible Man, or the Culture of Film” (1924), Screen 48, no. 1 (2007): 96-108.

Biorhythmanography 83

44 Ibid., 103. 45http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3bjK0ykeh4&list=UUwDLOoHkmVPzk PK4IW9bgnA, accessed May 15, 2014. 46https://www.facebook.com/groups/502157226497766, accessed May 16, 2014. 47https://www.flickr.com/photos/magicarpet-hongkong, accessed May 16, 2014. 48http://www.youtube.com/user/MagicCarpetHK, accessed May 16, 2014. 49 Cassetti, 17. 50 The Hong Kong population shrinks from 1.6m to 600,000 during the Japanese occupation (1941-5); by 1950 it has reached 2 million and it doubles to 4 million by 1971 [see International Historical Statistics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)]. 51 For example, Echoes of the Rainbow Shui Yuet Sun Tau 歲月神偷 (literally Time, the Thief) Alex Law, 2010, set in Wing Lee St, Sheung Wan. 52 On the alienation of public space involved in this process, see Alexander R Cuthbert and Keith G McKinnell, “Ambiguous space, ambiguous rights—corporate power and social control in Hong Kong,” in Cities 14, no. 5 (1997), 295-311; for a more recent news report updating the extent of these networks, see Charley Lanyon, “Hong Kong’s growing network of walkways,” South China Morning Post, March 19, 2013, accessed July 14, 2014, http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts- culture/article/1193774/hong-kongs-growing-network-walkways. 53 In a number of legendary films, including Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s (侯孝賢)Dust in the Wind (戀戀風塵 Liànliànfēngchén),1986, set in the 1960s; Tsai Ming-Liang’s (蔡明亮)first feature, Rebels of the Neon God(青少年哪吒, QingshaonianNezha) 1992; most recently Doze Niu’s (鈕承澤) box-office hit, Monga (艋舺) 2010, a gangster movie, set in the 1980s. All these films are set in the period and so they evoke the mood of a Taiwan, being critically examined by New Wave directors in cinema immediately after the lifting of martial law and attempting to come to terms with the unsettled past and its ghosts. 54 For partial accounts of these actions, see Lin I-Fan, “Taiwan: Protect Homeowners Against Forced Demolition,” accessed April 3, 2012, http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/04/03/taiwan-protect-homeowners-against- forced-demolition/print/ and “Taipei Urban Redevelopment controversy,” Skyscraper City, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.skyscrapercity.com/ showthread.hp?t=1501769; Mo Yan-chih, “Protesters, Police Clash as Homes are Razed,” Taipei Times, March 29, 2012, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www. taipeitimes.com/News/front/print/2012/03/29/2003528957; “Fight for your rights,”

84 Helen Grace

Taipei Times, March 29, 2012, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.taipeitimes. com/News/editorials/print/2012/03/29/2003528944; Mo Yan-chih, “Urban renewal project flawed: Hau,” Taipei Times, March 30, 2012, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/print/2012/ 03/30/2003529077 “Some injustice’ in urban act: minister,” and Taipei Times, Mar 30, 2012, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/print/2012/03/30/20035 29045. 55 See Mo Yan-chih, “Shilin Urban Renewal Protest Turns Violent,” Taipei Times, June 23, 2012, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.taipeitimes.com/ News/front/print/2012/06/23/2003536028. 56 The community surrounded a prison, established by the Japanese during the occupation, and was used by the KMT during the period. The neighbourhood had been home to veterans after 1949, and squatter and refugee settlements in recent years. See Ho Yi, “Refugees “squatting” on a gold mine,” Taipei Times, July 3, 2013, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.taipeitimes.com/ News/feat/print/2013/07/03/2003566212; Ho Yi, “This land is whose land?” Taipei Times, July 4, 2013, accessed May 20, 2014, http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/ feat/print/2013/07/04/2003566290. 57 Tomorrow Dali: 明日大理 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al3xAnBkXXI, 7.52m., accessed May 20, 2014. 58 Within a typical small business that involves continuity between domestic and commercial space. This is already a structure or model of non-separation between public and private–foregrounded in the piece’s title: 店家 (Shop Home), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlCqvcjyQVo, 7.56m., accessed May 20, 2014. 59 My Place, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuHQ6Ql9IHk, 12.46m., accessed May 20, 2014. 60 Flavour of Wanhua 萬華古早味, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8LE om0mhxQ, 12.43m., accessed May 20, 2014. 61 13 號整宅 No 13 Whole House http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzQbdMz 4eE4, 7.39m., accessed May 20, 2014. 62 孵 Sprout http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT4kD0Cggco, 10.27m, accessed May 20, 2014. 63 The temple is the Daoist religious centre of South Wanhua and was built in 1949, although the deity it commemorates—the “Flying Big Saint,” a doctor named Zhang Sheng-zhe who had been instrumental in ridding the area of plague in 1792—is substantially older. http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/廣照宮, accessed May 20, 2014.

Biorhythmanography 85

64 Temples were chosen because students had identified them as specific public spaces in the community. Students extended their own engagement and occupation of space by renovating a former private kitchen to become a community kitchen—or “Fun Fun House” (方方屋), near a defunct market. See https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152376565689893&set=o.1428757144 041053&type=2&theater, accessed May 20, 2014. For documentation of student activities, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EdQkgNmngs and https://www.facebook.com/hokatsai, accessed May 20, 2014. 65 The events, of this “chaotic yet inspiring spring” (Kang, email to author)— the duration of the events and the public response in the size of demonstrations, the cancellation of university classes and the relocation of cultural activities to the site—did not receive wide coverage in the West, as might have been expected, in spite of their obvious parallels with May ’68. For a general summary, see http://www.thechinastory.org/2014/04/the-sunflower-movement-in-taiwan/, accessed May 20, 2014; for another perspective, see Nao, “The student parliament: reflections on the Sunflower movement,” accessed June 4, 2014, http://libcom.org/blog/student-parliament-reflections-sunflower-movement- 31052014. 66 All about the world of Jia Zhang-Ke (2005), program notes for a season of screenings, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 8. 67 See Lucio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos, La Rythmanalyse (Rio de Janiero: Société de Psychologie et de Philosophie, 1931) and Gaston Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), 136- 55. 68 See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 69 Ibid., 247. 70 Bachelard, 29.