England We have kindly agreed to talk for us about Shanghai Futurism whatever that is, we are trying to find out tonight We are very very grateful to the brand for hosting this event and they have been absolutely wonderful and the director of Laris Roger is here Thank you Laris and Lorin was absolutely marvellous She will be doing some of the translation, not entirely It is not a fully translated event, in English, so there will be some summary by the wonderful Kulin. We are also very very grateful to New Year Tash, to New York University Shanghai, who has sponsored the event, and to Lisa Hockley, our wonderful Academy director, who is also
here in the audience, and to our wonderful students, the New York University students in Shanghai who represents one of the first cohort of students right here exploring the life of the future city. Is it the future city? I don't know. Here you go. It's great to be here. I have one more excuse to shamelessly plug my book, which was written And to be set in the future, I'm a historian, but I put it ending in 2010, and I wrote it in 2008. So it ended in the future, but a future that's now the past. So I will talk about the past, what the future has meant in Shanghai in the past,
and then get us up to what it means in the present. This is my book published in 2008, but it was in the 70s of the year. I was writing about the history of the future. Today, there are two parts. One is to explore the history of the history of the future, and how to imagine the future of the future. And in some of the stories you can see in the future. And I'll do a kind of zen presentation. I'll be putting up some images, and I won't directly explain them. I won't put any words up, but what I'm saying will relate to them. And this is just a totally weird slide made of things I took today,
and it won't make any sense until the end of the presentation, probably. 如果有的講座的末尾,大家才會知道他們究竟是什麼意思。 the Opium War when it was made into an international city with several different districts.
Chinese city was the old city that you saw on the first map, and then there was a French area and an international settlement that was British and American. And once this happened, Chinese people began to think of the international settlement and the French concession as a place to go to get a sense of the future. The Chinese would come to Shanghai though as a place they could stay in the present, what for them felt like modernity in the French concession, the international settlement, and visit the past in the old city and get a kind of hit of the past in the same area that Chinese were going to to get a hit of the future. The first picture of the 17th century is a very famous picture of the world.
It is a small village, so it is not a very small village. But in the last time, the city of the country has been So, for example, the local people who are visiting the local village, they can visit the future. For many of those who are here to the local village, they will think that the local village village is very popular. So, here is right near where we are. The first set of buildings on the Bund, before they built the new buildings that were new in the late 1800s,
and then the new, new buildings that were new in the early 20th century. These were the kinds of buildings that looked like the future to Chinese would visit them, the exotic West. There were machines in this Shanghai. This is one of a fire engine, and this was in one of the early Shanghai Chinese periodicals. It's an image of something that you saw in Shanghai that you didn't see anyplace else in the Chinese world. So that's what I mean when I talk about it seeming kind of futuristic. This would be the biggest clock that anybody would have seen in China. And then it was torn down and they built an even bigger clock in the same place, which is a clock that you still see here. So what you actually see in Shanghai from the 1840s to about the 1920s is the international settlement,
complicated ones as what you would see in Shanghai. I just want to ask, because I saw the Lamsung somewhere, so the Lamsung was in this street. The first photo of the photo of the first photo of the Lamsung Museum was the building of the Lamsung Museum. This building is now in the So now, flashing forward to the president for the first time, starting in the 1990s, once Poudong gets built,
first time Shanghai starts representing a possible future for both Westerners and for Chinese and this is when you see these these familiar now familiar sites but were incredibly unfamiliar and as a personal note I first came to Shanghai I lived here for a year in the mid 1980s and if you wanted to escape the city and go into the past you cross the river to go to Pudong because that was where there was a part where you got away from the hustle and bustle of modern life.
So here we have a symbol of the futurism, the maglev train. In the 19th century, the fastest machines that some Chinese had ever seen would have been in Shanghai. And Westerners, when they came to Shanghai, would see some of the slowest forms of travel they'd ever seen with a rickshaw. And they would both would be commenting on the oddness of the other. But here you have the maglev that was the fastest on Earth. So this is kind of a symbol of Shanghai having changed to be this commonly shared future as opposed to just one.
and that direction of the world and the way to the world is more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely to be more likely The event of the World War II is the event of the World War II. The World War II is to bring the world's energy and show up in the same place. It is also a future event. So here you see an object from the expo, a giant building that looks like a spaceship about to take off.
But it's competing with the futuristic look of the Pudong skyline without the expo. And this is an image I, I, our translator, I sent some bullet points and said, one of the things I said is in Shanghai, Houdon looks like Americans like me growing up thought the world of the Jetsons might look like. And since that was a new reference, I thought I would put an image of the Jetsons. The film is a classic classic film in the 60s. There are some very contemporary buildings and city buildings.
So he thinks that the film is very suitable for the same time. So what I'll end with two kinds of images that I think show a shift in Shanghai that interests me. The way in which Shanghai is thought about that relates to the future. These are two editions of the same guidebook. and at first they seemed to have basically the same images. But I think from 1992 to 1995, you have a shift in what the kick is about coming to Shanghai. In 1992, the kick of coming to Shanghai was you came to a place where China met the West, where there were things that represented the West and things that represented China. By 1995, I think you had came to Shanghai,
in part at least, not just because of that, but a place where the past met the future, or a possible future. That is a two different times of the book. In 1992, the book published in the book is to show the ! It is to show the book to show the ! It is to show the book to show the book to show the book to show the book to show the book to show the book. So these kinds of images on map covers, it used to be that you would have something that would say China and the West on a Shanghai cover. Now it's increasingly things past and present or past and future that is that kind of. So Shanghai has become as much a place where eras collide
as where cultures collide. And occasionally, Shanghai has things that even if they come from the West, don't exist in the West. So this was the first ever Barbie store in the world. And so it wasn't, it used to be that Shanghai would be the place where a company that had been established in the West would establish its first beachhead in China. But with the Barbie store, something that didn't exist in the West, but was linked to the West, opened first here. But it's also dangerous to sort of have slides representing the future, because the Barbie store is closed. Some of the other images I showed you were what Shanghai was supposed to look like.
It was supposed to have the biggest ferris wheel on earth. And the urban planning regime had that up there to show you what Shanghai would look like in the future. But it was never built. For example, Shanghai has a lot of countries that have been in China. But they have some of them in China, but they don't exist. The 8B The 8B The 8B The 8B So I'm going to end with just some images of movies, which are always a place that people, that you get a sense of people's dreams, fantasies, nightmares, and they can be about different things.
So Shanghai has been popular for filmmakers since the 1930s anyway. And in Chinese films set in Shanghai in the 1930s, I don't have any images here, but if you see Street Angel, which is one of my favorite of that period, the Chinese version, you have a lot of images of clocks and other kinds of machines that represent a kind of state-of-the-art modernity then. In the Hollywood movies at that time, it's all about exotic connections between East and West, with Shanghai Gesture and Shanghai Express. It's about, it's fantasy, it's not about the future, but fantasy is about blending of cultures or collision of cultures.
a lot of people think when a historian moves into studying popular culture, they're moving from studying, boring things to having fun. Which is true. And it's true. But the most painful research I've ever done was trying to watch all of Shanghai Surprise with Madonna and Sean Penn, which is one of the worst movies ever made. Madonna plays a missionary.
I'll say no more. But now, when Hollywood goes to Shanghai, it's as often as not to tell a story that may be partly about blending of cultures, but is as much about blending of eras, which fits in with the guidebook idea. So Code 46 was made in 2003 by a filmmaker who wanted to make a movie set in the future, but didn't want to have to spend money on making sets. So he looked around the world for a place that audiences would believe couldn't possibly exist.
And he shot the film in Pudong and Dubai. And rolled it together into a Shanghai of the future surrounded by a desert. And another television show around the same time, which Code 46 I've seen and I enjoy. This is Flatland, which was a television show set in a Shanghai of the future in the far-off year of 2010. starring Dennis Hopper, an easy rider fan.
And Code 46, set in the future, uses the Shanghai buildings, the Pudong ones. But it also plays with the idea of a future in which people are speaking a language that includes some words of Chinese mixed with some Western words, and which all the aesthetic and style is a blending together of East and West. And some people say Shanghai looks like Blade Runner come to life. Blade Runner was one of the first science fiction movies to combine, to imagine a future, it was a future of Los Angeles, in which elements of East and West came together in that way.
This is the future of the world of the world. They are like what the future used to look like. And the stewardess, if you call that, on the train is dressed the way I used to think of people dressed in the 1950s or 60s on airplanes in America would dress. But they were showing a film on television, which I couldn't get very good shots of.
But that's Tom Cruise, not looking as pretty as. And that's a shot, Shanghai, China. This was Mission Impossible 3, which was one of the first movies to set in Shanghai, Hollywood movies, to set on the Pudong side rather than the old building side, and to show Shanghai as this kind of futuristic place. and the transportation equipment that she has been doing is very important. But the service staff who wore this dress is also very traditional.
In the past, in the past, in the 90s, the American people who were thinking of wearing the dress. See, this is an amazing translation. She knew some of the things I was going to say, but she had no idea I was going to take these pictures because it was still in the future, the last time we had them. Down on the bottom there is the last photograph I took today, which was in the taxi cab as I was going from the train station to my hotel. And it's advertising the film Looper, which is now playing in Shanghai and is set in a Shanghai of the future. In the right side of the photo, the photo is on the right side. The photo is on the right side.
So I'll end just with a shot of stills of Looper. This is where it's shot in Shanghai, and here it was also. It had a kind of opening in Shanghai. One of the things now that's different about Hollywood had this love affair with Shanghai, but the films that were set in Shanghai used to be filmed on back lots in Hollywood. Then they were sometimes filmed in Shanghai, but could not necessarily be shown here. Now they're opening Looper is a bigger deal actually showing in Shanghai than showing in the West. So I'll end with that shot. The video may not be reproduced in China, but now we can see the big movies here at the
Hollywood show. And that's the top of the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Are we going to go straight in or do we want to let people have a chance to do this? No, I think we should just do straight in. Yeah. So we're going to, we'll let Nick Land speak and then we'll open it up to a conversation. Just hang on for a minute, there's only three things, so like five minutes or something, it doesn't matter.
is this working yeah welcome everybody after the lucidity and erudition of Jeff's discussion I see my basic role here as throwing everything into howling chaos and I will try to do that by complicating the way we talk about the future there's basically three things that I'm going to be hurtling through in this 15 minutes time related notions that I think definitely relevant to the
kind of things that just been talking about the things that I hope we're going know I'll be able to discuss later which the notion of a time spiral the notion of time dilation and the notion sorry I think better take time modernization and the notion of an absolute futurism but before starting on that very quickly I just want to add a few elements of context starting with where Jeff ended us with the movie looper I don't know how many people have seen it I definitely think people interested in the sort of topics that would have brought you here tonight I strongly recommend you do see it regardless of the your eventual judgment about the quality of the movie it's definitely interesting for
questions about Shanghai and about time it is a co-production and which has allowed it to get past the normal restrictions on the amount of foreign in the country. It has that kind of deep institutional relation to Shanghai. It has amazing Shanghai futuristic scenes, and it's obviously a time travel movie. I want to talk about this topic today. So, I will mostly open up three points. One is about the time-throwing, the second is about the time-throwing, and the third is about the If you haven't watched the episode of the Wiener Hodge, I'd recommend you to watch it. The relationship between the time and the time-trips is very interesting.
to a time travel movie, which conforms to what physicists call a closed time loop, sorry, a closed time-like curve. That's to say, time, there's one time it goes right round in a circle, things only happen once, if things go back in time, it's just to make things happen the way they always happen. Now that movie doesn't do that. It's glitched, it's glitched very clearly, probably as subtly as they thought they could get away with, and make sense, but it's still glitched, And so it deviates quite explicitly from being a closed time-like curve. It becomes something else. Maybe we might want to talk about what exactly it becomes. But the loop, insofar as it exists, is between the world of 2044 and 2074.
The most fantastic Shanghai scenes, I guess, are towards the end of that time, are 2074 Shanghai, where it's being portrayed as the city of the future. And this too is a concept, the city of the future. It's to me a very interesting idea, and it's something I hope we can get back to. It's a bit like a sudden, it's a bit of a sudden, a sudden, a sudden, a sudden, a sudden,
it's a sudden, a sudden, a sudden, a sudden, it's a sudden, a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, and it's a sudden, it's a sudden, and it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, it's a sudden, any effect from it at all. It's not better? You can't hear me? Okay, perfect. You can still hear me. Is this audible now? Is it better? It's better, yeah. Can you hear in the back? No. Speak into the mic. One, two, three, check. One, two, three, check. It's okay? Okay, I'll talk into the mic.
There can everybody. Okay, I think I'm not keeping up with my time so I'm just gonna start gabbling extremely fast and become totally incompatible. Just really fast, three quick contextual elements. One of them is a show that was held at the Skyscraper Museum in New York in 2010 called China Prophecy Shanghai. Anna's actually written about it. There was also a review in the Wall Street Journal, which I thought had an interesting title, which was The City of the Future Echoes the Past. It was very clear that talking about what's happening in Shanghai took people into this strange set of questions about time.
The pictures up here are my other piece of context. I think I'm mostly going to hope that we can get back to that. I think the only thing I'm going to try and really point to at the moment is I think these two buildings are kind of twins. I hope people see that. There's something going on between them. They're talking to each other. Obviously, the first one is the Park Hotel built in 1934, the second one is the Jim Mow Tower built in 1999. It's understandable that the Jim Mow Tower might be referencing the Park Hotel. For the Park Hotel to be predicting, anticipating, prophesying the Jim Mow Tower is a more interesting issue.
You can see a place in the last time in Shanghai called a small hall of a hall of a hall of hallways and the hall of the city of the city has a very big connection and it's like a small hall of the city which I think is a very big connection So I'm going to discuss some hallways which is a very complete connection to the city of the city of the city and the hall of the city The last piece of context is art deco That's something people shouldn't talk about fast. It's something that people can get irate about actually. People sometimes describe it as an illegitimate architectural category. I think it will suffice as a
fuzzy concept for basic trends in Shanghai modernist architecture. And there are several things that are very interesting about it I'll just poke a couple one is that the concept itself I think it was extremely retrospective it's based on a expo actually held in Paris in 1922 and it was only floated as a widely accepted historical architectural concept in 1968 so it was extremely retrospective people starting to talk about Art Deco, looking back at this particular French exposition of design and architecture as telling us something about a certain important theme in modernist architecture.
One more thing. The other thing that I think has to be said about it, two more things. one of them is that it's looking forward and looking backward at the same time it's all accidentally and there's several things people point to they point to Aztec architecture various things like that obviously one extremely crucial reference is the discovered tomb of Tutankhamun that was discovered in 1922 and immediately there was a Tutankhamun exhibition in France in the same year and this had a huge influence and so that at the same
time that Art Deco which didn't yet have that name was describing a modern style and it was looking back to the deep past and a past so deep that it could only have been discovered in modern time the modernity had allowed an access to the and that past itself became part of the way that that modernity chose to depict itself and the way that the styles that it thought naturally expressed an ultra-modernity. So this complicated time looping is something that I think ArtPekko has in its heart. After this kind of style, 1968, it was like being discovered. Everyone started to watch the very famous culture of the world.
And also, everyone will also watch the future and the future. This is a very famous modern modernist. It is a very modern modernist. It is a very modern modernist. and we can't talk about the wrong way in the future. retrospective, it's intuitive, it's inarticulate. Something happened long
before people decided to say what it was that had happened. And I think that difference is extremely crucial and it's extremely crucial that the international style has totally dominated our sense of what modernism is and it's only with a certain crisis of that accepted sense of modernity and modernism that we're able to look back and excavate this Art Deco modernity, which was happening, which was building things, which was reflecting a sensibility, which was defining modernity, but was not articulated in that high theoretical, programmatic, ideological sense. At the same time, this art de Bro is also very practical and practical to describe the modernist culture.
It is not a very common concept to illustrate modernist culture, but to describe modernist culture. Tell us what is modernist culture. Okay, I'm going to try and pick up speed because I know I'm stretching my limits on this already. So I'm absolutely down to starting. And as I say, three basic points. So the first one, the notion of a time spiral. Now I really am going to be much quicker about this than I'd like to be. I think it's a fascinating thing. It's very suggestively raised in the book that I'm sure you've come across, which is called Oracle Bones, A Journey Between China's Past and Present, published in 2006
by Peter Hessler. And at the start of that book, he has an absolutely beautiful, old, historical diagram of Chinese history done as a spiral. He explicitly talks about a time spiral. He raises the whole thing very suggestively. And it obviously ties with the themes, Oracle Bones, because these oracle bones just as I was saying about Tutankhamun they are an even more extreme example of this they were discovered in 1899 right at the end of the 19th century so at the beginning of what we see as the absolutely classical modernist core period and yet they are opening a new and they themselves are obviously prophetic writings.
They are aiming to the future. And so in this discovery of the Oracle bones, there is another time loop being created. Something has been discovered in the deep past, and that deep past is something that was already reaching out in its own way to the future. The first thing I mentioned is the time of the time. It was mentioned that in the book of the book, they said that they were basically in a way of saying that they were in a way of saying that. It seems like a long time ago, they wrote down the words that they were in the future. So the notion of a time spiral,
I strongly predict has a very good future. I think it's an extremely powerful notion and it resolves something extremely fundamental because it allows you to avoid the choice between cyclic and progressive time. Obviously that opposition, choosing between a time that is basically cyclical and traditional and a time that is progressive and modern, has been enormously influential. It's been very colloquial and popular. It's not been something dependent upon a high level of theoretical articulation. It seemed very natural to people. And especially in China, it's had an extremely important role.
If you look at the key episodes of Chinese modernist ideology, they very much tended to articulate themselves in these terms. If you look at the May the Fourth Movement, it definitely said we must go for Western progressive time and escape our own stagnant cyclical time. If you go forward from that to the Cultural Revolution, the same basic sense that by destroying the past and affirming a progressive notion of time, one is therefore on a path of modernization.
So this notion that rejection of cyclical time is the same thing as modernization has been an extremely important concept, I would say, both in the West, going back a long way. It's even used as a way of articulating different between an Abrahamic religion, which is historical and progressive, and pagan, ancient, ahistorical, cyclical religion, or between industrial and rural types of social organizations. Obviously, a time spiral doesn't force you into that alternation. A time spiral is something that is simultaneously progressive and cyclical. In terms of the two major movements of China, the Chinese movement was very strongly
to absorb the experience of the Chinese in the past, to completely break down or break down and the history of the old age. The history of the old age is the same. The time-ranging is actually the same as time or history. So just quickly one more thing on time spirals is just to say that if you see modernization in the West and the East as an attempt to escape cyclical time, there's a deep irony in the sense that the faster and more extremely it tries to enter into a form of accelerated progressive time, the more insistently cyclicity returns. It returns in the form of the very notion of accelerated change,
when mathematically expressed, takes a non-linear form. it's expressed by the fact that the industrial economy tends to form self exciting loops the notion of a robotic robot factory perfectly captures that the fact that the economy as it modernizes and becomes autonomous stop producing cyclical effects that then get studied retrospectively business cycles long ways these new type of cyclical phenomena and the fact that the most emblematic form of intellectual expression of modernist thought is basically cybernetic nonlinear types of thinking looking at self stimulating
water catalytic system systems that are loops that are spirals that are circling upon themselves and and obviously as we've seen in science fiction again the a kind of archetypal form of hyper-modernistic literature, there is this attraction to the notion of a time loop and the notion back into a notion of cyclical time. So in the modern art, we often see, in some of the art videos, and to show up to these art-like, like the modern technology or the modern technology, they are all going to turn back time and not to emphasize that it is a modern technology.
ahead on that trend so what are these trends there's all kinds of useful examples we could use I'll just start with two or take two that are relevant to us because they're time-based the first one is to do with the depth of history we've already seen with Tutankhamun we've already seen with the Oracle Bones this superficially paradoxical fact that modernity actually advances deeper into the past that tracks on a very neat curve everybody knows that in the West the traditional age of the earth is less than 6,000 years old if you want to see the details the Jewish calendar tells you exactly 5,773
years and that actually starts one year before the creation of the world and by 1779, Buffon had said that it was 75,000 years old. 1862, Kelvin was saying something between 20 to 400 million years old. 1920s, which is the period that I'm kind of wanting to concentrate on, it had already decided that the world was a few billion years old. So, modernity is dilating time extensively. It's not just moving you forward, it's moving into a deeper and deeper sense of time. It's also an intensive exploration of time. If you follow the history of clocks, which you've already seen, Jeff was already talking about
He mentioned about the exhibition of the show about the show. Actually, the modernity is the time of the war. technological advances but there's a very continuous lineage of chronological development in the West and beginning in the early years of the Renaissance where a clock no way was it close to being able to resolve a second pendulum
clocks didn't start appearing until the second half of the 17th century and the real question of marine sorry time accuracy began with marine chronometry John Harrison won the prize for the marine chronometer with a clock that was capable of losing less than five seconds in two weeks. Quartz oscillators, quartz clocks came in in our period 1920s. They started off no better than Harrison's clock actually but
eventually they got to an accuracy that's something like 10 seconds a year. Atomic clocks one second every 300 million years. In 2008, a quantum logic clock accurate to one second in a billion years. So you can see the curve of that process. That is modern time understood on its intensive aspect. So, to be futuristic on one level is simply moving into this bigger expanse of time. You're discovering the continuity of the timeline, but it's deeper, it's bigger, it's more specific, it's more refined than you imagine.
So part of what it is, if you're saying, well, what does it really mean to me, what kind of prediction about the future are you making? Time has always dilated in the future. It's become bigger, it's become more specific. So we need to talk about the future and the future. I can tell you that the future will be more advanced and more accurate. Okay, this is it, finally now. Sorry about this, everybody. I know I've abused your whatever it is. Thank you. No, no, sorry, I'm still going. I'm still playing now. Five more minutes at most. I'm sorry about this. There is pure futurism. Yeah, yeah, absolute future really quickly. Look, everyone's familiar with the relative future.
That's what people think the future is. Past, present, future. The future is what isn't the present or the past. I won't go into that any further. It's obvious that people... The best way, I think, to get into a notion of what an absolute future might be like is to start with now, you know, the present. The future is defined as being something that's beyond the present. What is the present? Actually, that's extremely complicated. What is now? It can't be a point. A point has no duration, it's not time. It can't be a minimal unit of time because thanks to modernity, our notion of what a minimal unit of time is is actually pretty mind-bending. It's the time it takes for a photon to cross a Planck length. And that is 5.39 times 10 to the minus 44 seconds.
Now, I'm not a maths geek, and I don't know how many maths geeks there are out there. I don't really quite get what 5.39% of the minus 44 seconds is. So I tried to actually kind of thrash it out a little bit. A trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second is still more than 10 million Planck time units. It's interesting that if you look at the number of seconds since the beginning of the universe, that's 4 times 10 to the 17th. That means if we take, which I think is realistic, now as we intuitively understand it, it's about a second. If you say what time is it now, if you get it to a second you're feeling pretty good for yourself. That now is vastly closer to the age of the universe than it is to a Planck time unit.
Vastly, vastly, vastly, several trillions times trillions times. It's not closer. So basically, I think it's useful to just take it, look, now clearly is not an instant, nothing like an instant. It's a scale-free concept. You know, we've got our own biological cognitive capabilities that make us think now is roughly a second. In doing so, we're just in our own little primate world. An instant, as we know, is 10 to the minus 44 orders of magnitude below that. Go the whole way. Say now is the age of the universe. You're not far off. It doesn't make any difference. That's just 17 orders of magnitude.
Say my now is the age of the universe. Absolute future is what is still not yet if now is the age of the universe. So, even in this extreme case, the absolute future is not outside time, but it is exposed as the edge of the outside time, connecting to the present, but never absorbed into it or converted into it. That absolute future never becomes the present by waiting long enough. If you want to wait to the end of the universe, you've got nowhere nearer waited long enough. It belongs to history rather than metaphysics because it is effectively on the greater tracks towards which things tend.
Okay, final few words. So, you always think it's a constant, from the past to the future. but the time is from now and from now and from now so it's not that the time is now and now but it's now and now so thank you for using this technology We know that from the beginning of the year, it is the 17th century. I don't remember. But with this year, we should be able to come back from now. So, he said this is a simple future-like.
I don't know if he's in the middle of the year. Let's still stand to everyone. okay so just one more what team what's there so you want to say that I really promise to shut up so the proposal that is that Shanghai art deco perhaps I'll take a general and Shanghai modernism in general inclines was an absolute future insofar as it days it doesn't weirdly and not by the straightforward exhaustion of a projected future through absorption of the present and then the past. Okay, I'll really rush it up now. Okay, thanks everyone. Do you want to stop here?
Oh, sure. That's great. Yeah. So maybe I'll try to open up the conversation a little bit and then we'll get people to feed into that. I'm wondering if we can sort of bring it to the theme of this series which is this idea of urban creativity and maybe in thinking about now all the time words have been completely twisted, I'll use them anyway that, you know, how does Shanghai as a future city create its own culture?
And maybe one way of thinking about that is in relation to Beijing. So, Jianghu is just in Beijing, so we can get him into the Shanghai-Beijing competition. And thinking about how Beijing roots itself in its own past, and so becomes the cultural center of China. And what is it to sort of take that on from the point of view of the future? So I guess it's a version of the high-pair-junkai. In terms of the comparison of the Chinese government, Beijing is the Chinese government and culture center. How will the future of Shanghai as a future?
But of course now they're in a five year cycle of expos. So it's another example of something that's the future is reimagined on five year cycles. But the Olympics could have been an example of celebrating ancient traditions. It's opening ceremonies for Olympics often go back to earlier periods. So in the Beijing Olympics it went back to Confucius and the starting point. In London Olympics it went back to rural time and then to industrial time. The expo could have, should have been about a city rather than a nation, and about the future rather than about the past.
And the expo sort of was that here, but actually the expo ended up being much more about the nation than about the city. And I think it was a missed opportunity in many ways to have a distinctively Shanghai view of, and this was what some Shanghai intellectuals complained about the expo as well. In the end, the symbol of the expo wasn't something that linked up to, it wasn't a grand art deco object or neoclassical object like that mirrored the bun. It was the China Pavilion that had really nothing to do with Shanghai and only to do with the nation. Reina, Shanghai, was just a simple comparison to the world.
The world was always a show for the future. It was a stage every five years, so every five years we would be able to see the future. But the idea is that the world's largest building is China. China is a very country-based building, not the city itself. In 2008, Beijing was the first place in the Olympics. The tradition of the history of the world is to give the tradition of the past. So this is the direction of the world's way to look forward. Do you want to have a go there? Just about the idea of creativity as Shanghai's ambitions or destiny or whatever to be a future metropolis.
oh yeah yeah no I'll just say about that then I don't think Art Deco could have happened in Beijing I think Art Deco has a special relationship with modernity that exceeds any nation and it cannot be articulated can be planned it's always retrospective you discover what modernity was throughout echo and whatever the the relationship of Beijing to modernity, I think it has to be far closer to the political ideologies of modernity than it can possibly be to that kind of organic, spontaneous modernism that we've seen in Shanghai.
I think that ADKRO will not appear in Beijing. Because ADKRO just mentioned that it is the most valuable city of modernity. It is over the country and is very clear to the history and the modernity. It is very common and very consistent. But in Beijing, it is often due to the politics of the modernity. It is not possible to have that common and consistent. My question is for both of you, why architecture? Why is time and modern always decline? Benjamin says that architecture is a mass meeting, that it is always consumed in a state of distraction.
Is this the reason why architecture is chosen to always talk about the future in a sense? Does it have to do with regimes, does it have to do with money, does it have to do with space? It's one of the oldest media, certainly, that human beings have ever devised, I don't know, for both of you. Why architecture, for thinking about this? I was part of our conference once on urban icons. What are the objects that, to put it simply, are on the postcard that let you know where you are? or that in a movie, if there's a shot, you know where you are. And it struck me, the establishing shot, that almost always there's a piece of architecture that tells you.
Sometimes a natural setting, but often a built piece of architecture. But there's also often a mode of transportation. So you know the movie is set in London if you see Big Ben and a double-decker bus. You know you're set in San Francisco if you see the harbor of natural thing and you see a cable car. Yeah, but why the future? So yeah, with the future, but I think often architecture is something of the newly built. So the architectural thing in Paris is one. Paris was a lot of, for a long period of time, the city of the future. What it was represented by was the Eiffel Tower, which was built for an expo, was the tallest building in the world at the time it was built. It was supposed to be torn down right afterwards, and people hated it and were waiting for it to be torn down,
and then it was stayed up and became a defining of the city. And the metro, which was a kind of, the metro stop was the other iconic thing, which also represented future. Some forms of architecture, I think, are not just buildings that you take in with distraction, but there are also some things, the iconic ones, you often have a relationship to. So in Shanghai, the iconic structure was the customs house clock that was called Big Ching. It was like a big van. And it was an object that people saw, but it was also one that they used to set their watch button. So it was something that you had an interaction with. And often, iconic structure you do something with. The Eiffel Tower, you go up in it to look down on the city. And the tallest buildings in Shanghai you often went up to to look down.
So I think those would be some of the things that I would think of that come to mind with that. But you might think that one of the differences there too with Haipai and Jingpai, the buildings that have tended to represent Beijing have been ones that have something that don't have to do with the future until very, very recently, but had to do with the past. And in Shanghai they tended to be things that have to do with the future. And here I was just, I've never thought about this, but the twin buildings idea, you can actually have a lot, those aren't the only twin buildings. The other twins would be the Peace Hotel right by here, and the Pearl of the Orient Tower right across the river. Both in their time were described as the Eiffel Tower equivalent in Shanghai. So you have a guidebook from the 1930s which says the Peace Hotel which is to Shanghai but the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.
And then when the Pearl of the Orient Tower was built, it was displacing it as that. So I think there you can tell a lot about what kind of city it is, if its iconic structure is supposed to represent the future. You can tell if their iconic mode of transportation is supposed to represent speed. I come from LA, the freeway. For a while, Los Angeles represented for better or worse the future. And I think it's no accident that when Shanghai made this claim to the future, there was the magnetic-led train, which is a really silly form of transportation, which takes you from the middle of nowhere to someplace kind of near the middle of nowhere. I think the building is a little bit more. I think many buildings were built in a very happy building,
like the Alpha-Tier塔. It was also built for the year's work. But then it became the building of the Baal. So many buildings were also very looking at the building of the building. This is the future of the building. and also the transportation area. The transportation area is also located in the city of the city. The transportation area is also located in the city of the city of the city. The transportation area is located in the city of the city of the city of the city. The transportation area is located in the city of the city of the city of the city.
So, we can see that the ! The The Chinese government has been in the past few years with the very future, very famous, and the Chinese government has been in the past. But in the past, when the Chinese government was founded, it was also called a national-owned building. It was from LA, from the New York City, and the New York City was very popular. They were also in the New York City's and the way it is to recognize it is the future of this country. I want to say that this is a really fascinating question.
Why is it that we trust architecture so much to define our sense of historical periodistic, epoch? an architectural definition provides a kind of solidity to that, but nothing else seems to quite do. I think it's really important. I just say about that that I think we've really got a spectrum. You know, people can vary about what they put on the two ends of their spectrum. I mean, to be slightly parodic, maybe to have theology at one end, and the most base form of commercial interaction and leap out to people's imagination at the other end. And architecture is in the middle of that, actually. And I think in raising this question,
we tend to just look at the top with architecture at the bottom of the spectrum, very interesting, you know, why not music? Why not mathematics? Why not philosophy? Why not the sciences? Why architecture? But we can look the other way and say, well, you know, it's architecture rather than, you know, architecture is a form of material production. We look at architecture rather than we look at popular products, rather than we look at the forms of commercial transaction that were prevalent in the particular Epoch. And I think when you look at it on that scale, it begins to make more sense. May I stop there, I think. Why do people not want to look at the buildings?
Look at the buildings like this, it is also a very suitable historical or historical view. Hi, so I want to thank both of you for coming. Actually, my question is pretty much based on what you were just saying. And I wanted to ask you about architecture, especially compared to Dubai, which Dr. Waterstrom, you're also mentioning.
I found it interesting that just China and Dubai both kind of represent the future in terms of aesthetic, but are still sort of not quite modern in terms of socio-political structure. And in what terms, how do you see those two in the beginning? You mentioned that the United States and Shanghai are the main director of the future. But just from the political and political level, they are not so modern. How do you see this difference? That's a great point. I think that's a wonderful way to think about it. And also, to the theme of creativity in Shanghai, one of the things that architects are drawn to China,
a lot of the most iconic structures are made by foreign architects, working sometimes with Chinese architects, but doing things that they wouldn't be allowed to do because some of the things we associate with modernity, like safety codes and non-exploitation of labor, make it difficult to do. I mean you could say that in some ways maybe to play devil's advocate when the United States was having its surge to claim the a share of the future it was not ahead of the curve but rather behind the curve with some kinds of social protections so it's a very I mean it's a very
deep plot there is it that in some ways you almost have to be behind in some ways in order to be ahead and others. If part of what modernity is all about, I'm thinking about this with time, modernity is always about being faster than an earlier period, but some of the protections that come along with social modernity inevitably involve slowing down. Anyway, it's great, great question. I'll give you a simple example. You can give applause.
There is no way to do this. So it's not a bad thing. It's a very good way to think about this. futuristic. I think we should learn a lot about our experience with Soviet science fiction and that definitely had a very strong sense of what was socio-politically futuristic. All aliens capable of interstellar transport were going to be communist and now I'm sure there's some people who still think
that's true. I require a little bit more support for that and I think that looking and taking that example we should be a bit more careful about sense about what is inevitably progressive in the strict, neutral, moral free sense of just being where we're going to be, than maybe is implied by some of that. So I think that the most important thing is that the social, political, and political is not exist.
I mean it's very Chinese and it's going to very much develop in that, in the promotion of the Chinese culture and Chinese spirit. But when you look at Shanghai, sort of the history of it is from the get-go, sort of a mixture of different cultures and different nations. And there's also sort of this link to trying to be a bit more like Hong Kong, I think, which is dissociated from China. and Shanghai is still very much Chinese. So how do you view Shanghai's future incorporating Chinese identity?
相比,它其實還是與國家體制有非常緊密的聯繫,那你如何來看待它是不是有可能去逃脫或者是離社體制跟原刑? That's a, I mean again, a really, really big question, and I think it's a question for Shanghai, and you post it well by bringing Hong Kong in. in. There used to be this kind of condescension to Hong Kong as being purely materialistic and not a culturally or politically aware place. But I think what recently we've seen is Hong Kong, which saw itself as sort of threatened by Shanghai's rise, has actually has actually been more capturing of something that Shanghainese used to like to claim was a particular high-pice sensibility.
A cosmopolitanism that was willing to look in very creative ways at combining Chineseness and international flows. So I think it's really an open question for Shanghai. And when you see things like, I mean the expo would be one example where the nation-ness seemed to in the end trump the city-ness. But there are others as well. The Shanghai Museum, which has its architectural form that references something that really doesn't have anything to do with Shanghai per se. But this vessel, or ancient vessel. you have in some ways maybe this is maybe the high-pie Jing-pie is the wrong way to think about it
you actually have a kind of Hong Kong approach to mixing and matching versus a Beijing nation-centered approach and some of the moves in Shanghai I mean I think there's still the potential for Shanghai to be something different But some of the moves have been more in step with Beijing. And some of the things that used to be associated with Shanghai are happening not just in Hong Kong but Guangzhou. Shanghai used to have the most daring newspapers and now Nanfang Jomo is not in Shanghai. Yeah.
But if you go to the Shanghai World War, whether it's from its architecture or its museum, it's still very beautiful in China. You can't see any of the Shanghai style. So you can take a look at it. Actually, wait though, I've just dumped on the Shanghai Museum, but there are some very creative Shanghai settings. This might be one. But there is also the, I don't know how you pronounce it exactly, Huziwei, the orphanage museum in Xu Jiahui that looks back to the particular role of Jesuits' culture in forming distinctive things about Shanghai and the ways in which certain forms of Western art were introduced through this orphanage.
and then people who grew up in that and were exposed to that art went on to create very distinctive and interesting art that was neither purely Western nor purely Chinese. There are things to be reclaimed. There's still the potential for... I'm still rooting for Shanghai to reclaim that particular part of its past. But it's not clear always that it's able to do it these days. I think this question
lures us into such profound political incorrectness that I'm going to be very cautious about it but I think Shanghai is the capital of a very distinctive world culture that is that is Chinese maritime cosmopolitan commercially oriented that is related very very strongly Hong Kong between in the golden age of Shanghai people move between Hong Kong and Shanghai extremely smoothly and fluidly there's the role of the comprador influence from Guangdong in Shanghai in the Golden Age is extremely large so there is a whole cultural sphere that Shanghai is the natural
center of gravitational and obviously there is a complicated political tension between how much that culture is able to express itself without disturbing other structures of power. And I think that's going to be the big game that everyone's going to see playing out in the future. It is a huge impact on the world of the world.
I'd like to follow up on what you just said and ask another big question. Honestly, because I don't know at all what the answer is. Creatively speaking, what do you think, is there a collective ambition for this city? And what are some of the things that it has to overcome to get there? There seems to be great potential, but also serious and bad. Do you have a goal or goal or goal to achieve? and the basic moves that Deng Xiaoping made there.
Obviously, a huge amount of that is playing off very carefully this relationship between the autonomy of certain regions and the overall sense of Chinese national integrity, which was seen as the big achievement of the 1949 revolution and the new China. and so if you now go to Guangdong and you you know look at what's happening in Shenzhen and you see the relationship to Hong Kong there the whole thing is on a very I wouldn't say high wire in the sense of trying to over dramatize the fragility of it I think it's actually quite robust but on a kind of ideological and public level it is quite delicate in the sense that obviously the steps
forward have been made by actually formalized sense of producing this very strong sense of autonomy in certain regions so they can actually express their own potentiality so the future of Shanghai is very much in exactly the same fact you know there is not going to be a Shanghai SAR officially but I honestly think a lot of people really are looking at something that would be that but not explicitly because if you look at the plans this there's a Shanghai 2020 plan that involves complete globalization of the Shanghai financial system in a way that makes no sense unless there is a massive amount of autonomous economic
decision-making taking place in this city and and I think that this is obviously you know the whole question might sorry I won't go on about this is it's extremely interesting question but I'll just say one more thing which is just to say I think that if one is going to be really stereotypical look at these East West differences one of them is that I think Westerners really if they have some big thing going on they have to shout it from the rooftops I honestly don't think that's a Chinese characteristic. I think they'd rather get something done and be discreet about it then make a big fuss and that thing not happen. So I think much more is going to happen than perhaps Westerners saying hey why aren't you shouting this from the rooftops are going to be happy with.
I think the kind of things people Westerners are going to want to hear people say or declare or whatever, protest about. I think that that is not necessarily what we should be looking at. And we should be looking more about things getting done in a way that is polite, that's safe-faced, that is discreet, that's practical and pragmatic, but will still actually be hugely important to making the city fulfilled its potential. Thank you.
because of the country is a particular city, so in the country, when we talk about this, everyone will feel very clean, especially when we talk about the issue of the issue, we will be careful and careful. So I think the most important difference is the most important difference between the people and the people who have a big issue, or the people who have a big voice, They will be very hard to get out of the way, and to make everyone hear. But I believe in China, they won't be able to use such a way. It should be very low and very stable. After doing things, they won't be loud. I'd like to pick up on one thing that Nick said before about the flow between Hong Kong or South China and Shanghai.
One of the things about when global cities take off, they also take off because of people from other places coming there and doing things. That's kind of natural. And we often focus on the Shanghai story being people from other countries coming here. But actually in the heyday of Shanghai's flourishing as a cultural center in the 19-teens, 20s, and 30s, when the best newspapers were here and the best writers were here. They were often people who came here from Beijing or moved between Shanghai and Beijing quite regularly. The one optimistic, the most optimistic thing to me about the expo was the film that was made to go along with it,
which was made by Jia Zhangke, who's not a local Shanghainese, but made this quite subtly, really interesting, more Shanghai, And it was the most Shanghainese thing about the expo in some ways. And it was made by somebody who wasn't Shanghainese interviewing people who had ties to Shanghai, including people who now live in Taiwan or now live in Hong Kong, which is very interesting. And the film ends with an interview with Han Han, who, if we wanted to think of one way of where some kind of totally different version of something of that kind of hyphi spirit, you could think about it in that figure.
If we remember the last year 20 years of the country, Shanghai is a very modern cultural center. There were many stories of Shanghai. But the point is that the show was from the public broadcast from the foreign country from the Gia Zhang Khos' director. He was not mainly in the national media, but he was in the international community, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and in other places. He was talking about a very good and good I think we have time for like one or two more questions if there are some. Each question could be a more symposium.
Thank you for your speech. It's had me thinking about a couple of issues and there might not be direct questions but a couple of observations. observations and there relates to two elements which are important in Shanghai as well. One is about politics and I want to talk about futuristic politics because what we see today in Pudon is the result, the future we see as a world, is the result of a certain type of decisions on a political level. And my first observation would be, isn't it strange that the two people people that were mayor of Shanghai in the 80s, Jiang Zemin and Zunong Ji, later became the leaders of the country in the 90s in order to build up Shanghai. So Shanghai is being
decided on via Shanghai to Beijing and back. This is the first one. The second one relates to financing and economy. And as I understand this time is very relative, but I find it quite ironic that both the Park Hotel, when it was built, the Thomas Tower of Shanghai, Shanghai was built amid the global economic crisis. Currently, the Shanghai Tower, the long side, which is going to be 630m height, another base for the sky, is also being completed amongst the global economic crisis. So actually, could it be that Shanghai's future only shines brighter, because the rest of the world is in shams? The question is about the future of the country. The development of the country is based on the 80-90s.
The two leaders were first in the South. After the country was in the South. The second question is about the economic economy. Shanghai's two largest buildings are built in the world's economic crisis. Is this a global crisis in the world's economic crisis? That's... I'll let that comment go. It's good. I don't think... The only thing I would say is, and there's no way to prove this, but My own sense is that Shanghai's takeoff,
while it had to do with particular officials with Shanghai ties rising, I think it also had a lot to do with the desire for looking ahead to 1997, when Hong Kong would become part of the People's Republic of China again, and not wanting it to be the only city in the People's Republic of China that had a claim to being completely modern and futuristic. And I think actually that might be a significant part of the takeoff in the 1990s, was a feeling that Shanghai, which might have been held back or seen as kind of tainted by its partial colonization, once Hong Kong was in the mix,
at least Shanghai had never been completely colonized. So this idea of building up Shanghai, because no other city really have the potential to compete with Hong Kong as a kind of futuristic city. I think that's part of the equation too, as well as Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji's specifics. The observation about
skyscrapers and economic crisis is something that I think has become an indicator people have seized upon generally. It's in a way predictable in the sense that of course you reach for the sky just as about the sky is going to cave in. I think all that I would say about that is the fact that if you look at the development of any economy that is now seen as meteoric, it's punctuated by crises. I mean, the notion that you're going to just keep up on a smooth curve without some serious crunching, I think even without reading Schumpeter, and of course I advise everyone to read Schumpeter, it's not going to happen.
Creative destruction is the way the future happens. So I wouldn't be too... if we're talking about 2074, I wouldn't be thrown off of being by the fact that 2012 was looking a bit gloomy. We are going to look forward to it. The global pandemic crisis does not mean that in 1974 our lives will not be better. So, I think we'll stop it there.
I'd like to thank Du Ling again for our... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. of the year talking about architecture cinema Buddhism and other things so technology Shenzai so please join us and thank you all for coming
yeah thank you for making Hi, you did a wonderful job. Hi. Hi. My name is Frank Lang. I'm from the National Public Radio. Oh, hi. Hi. Maybe I can get him right now. Yeah, nice to see you. Big topic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ni ha. How are you? How was the... I'm not sure about your relint. Oh, I'm not sure. He wants to go to the signature?
He wants to go to the signature. Oh, like this? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. No, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Great. I'm playing Roddy. I saw. I'd like to go to that. Yeah, I'm just going to have a couple of years. Your song out? In English it's River Town, Oracle Homes and One of Country Driving. Oracle is not published in Japan. Oh, really? Oh, that's interesting. So you are a futurist or a culture expert? Well, I honestly don't know. Give me my hand. I don't know. I mean, I work for a magazine. So you talk about the transfer?
I just talk about what I meant just a bit. So I have no academic credentials so it's okay. So what do you do with me? I work for a magazine. So what kind of life do you do? Let me give you my card. What's the best way you get a book about? A trip period? Yeah, yeah, same thing. 25 years. So you are edit? I've got a blog. Actually I'm not going to find it easy. I think you have to look for this name.
It's called Urban Futures. You broke Spotify? Yeah, it's on our company's site. But I'm afraid I don't know. You mentioned earlier there was a question about Jigai Insight