2022 Master graduation Thesis, Master of Photography & Society, the ROyal Academy of Arts, the Hague; supervised by Andrea Stultiens

Title(Hang the Pig!);

Sub-title
(Exploring the culturally situated notion of failure using image representation in different ideologies);

Abstract
Representation through images is central to the process of generating meaning for the culturally situated notion of failure. Autoethnography is used as the main research method to embody this notion of failure in three different contexts of ideologies; Chinese Socialist patriotism, neo-liberal capitalism in the aspect of the creative industry, and the new media environment, and its algorithm under globalization as a linear time narrative, starting from “my” growth as a Chinese child to a young creative industry worker, eventually to a broader identity as the Other. It explores the representation of failure in images in three different formats: banners, advertisements, and digital images on social media. Contrary to the underlying rules of promoting determined success, they also inevitably flag failure. Failure as an abstract and fluid notion strings the story together to reflect on the dichotomy of representation in three contexts using images.

Introduction
I was born in the Year of the Pig and in many cultures, pigs are seen as dirty and often the target of dietary restrictions. They are also used in derogatory vernacular, for example, Facebook Community Standards reflect on this cultural norm that declares pigs as intellectually or physically inferior animals. Calling someone “a pig” on the platform is a breach of its user code and a form of online bullying.

As a child, I was made fun of by the other children and I was left feeling an embodiment of a failed image as a “pig”. It took me a very long time to accept that I was born “a pig”. Growing up, I started to realize that accepting this fact, was the first step to embodying my failures. The authorities of discipline, neoliberalism, and mass media created abstract but binary standards (rules) that I was defined by and as a result, they defined my failure and success.   

It started with being told how to be an obedient child, a good student, and enroll in a good university. After my graduation, I joined the creative industry working as an image creator and graphic designer. My job was to create symbols of consumption in the form of images shining as advertisements on billboards, after all, success under neoliberalism is to be a better consumer. Eventually, I turned into a consumer of the very symbols I created which triggered my biggest failure to this moment. The increased daily usage of screen-based media and the algorithms behind it, construct an impenetrable barrier that reassociates, reorganizes, and re-determines reality. I look at the powerlessness and failure in identifying the Other from my own perspective and try to understand how the Other is constructed.

I created a dehumanized image-based world made of screens and billboards in the game engine Unity 3D, a world made of pig and pork images. I ask questions like: “How does a pig look at screens in a pig’s world?” Or “Would pigs be offended by pork images on social media?” The virtual world is displayed as an installation of videos on multiple screens representing different multi-dimensions of piling man-made products.

Later abandoned, the man-made products remain pieces of evidence tracing human existence. The large number of images we create, view, and consume every day, is also evidence of the database that we have been here.

Research question
How do culturally situated ‘images’ meant to promote the idea of success inevitably flag failure? How could the images I make in my practice succeed in their representation of failure?

Research Methodology
In the thesis, I use autoethnography as the main research method to embody the topic which Carolyn Ellis defines as: “Research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political.” “Myself” and my personal experiences are essential triggers for most of my practice. Experiences and encounters transform and translate theories built from the gaze and voice of the Other into tangible experiences, thus building access to the Other.
The autobiographical story of myself in a time linear narrative starts with my childhood story as a young professional and becoming the Other. I discuss my encounters with three different ideologies within my thesis while positioning “I”  as the self and the Other. It starts with the Socialist patriotism and Chinese nationalism in regards to the educational system positioning the ‘self’ as a Chinese child, who went through this experience which develops into a more general economic ideology as liberal capitalism or neoliberalism, as a “self” who is educated to work in the creative industry; eventually, under the ideology of globalization and new media. The “I” appears in an image of the Other, encountering and communicating with the Other within the I, with me as the Other.

Central notions
Images are innocent before contextualizing them or shall we say, images are meaningless without contextualization. However, different inter-subjective and inter-ideological realities and illusions can bring images to widely divergent understandings. Yuval Noah Harari made a comment on human society's history: Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
In the thesis, the first person narrative as “I” and “my” experience, is the medium for translating the abstraction between images and their contexts. “I” is a female who grew up in China, worked in the creative industry and moved to the Netherlands.
Moreover, failure and success are the topics that string the stories together. Failure and success are both very abstract and fluid-like concepts as images. They imply the existence of some mechanism for selecting appropriate goals in this goal-aroused system. The contextualized failure and success also mirror the underlying truth of the system and society they exist in. The thesis aims to reveal and evoke the underlying rules in different societies through the presentation and representation of failure and success in images with an individual proposition.

The Database
A database is generally defined as an organized collection of structured information, or data typically stored electronically in a computer system. A database is usually controlled by a database management system ​(DBMS). Together, the data and the DBMS, along with the applications that are associated with them, are referred to as a database system, or database in short.2 For the purposes of this article, the database I am referring to, is the sum of all structured information or data including but not limited to; documents stored by users (people) on the cloud, photos, comments made on social media, online chats, YouTube videos, watch logs, metro card purchases, and recharge records, etc. In short, it is the sum of all the traces and evidence of the user’s actions and trajectories on the internet as a collective whole.

The Japanese cultural critic Azuma Hiroki uses otaku cultural practice in 2000 as a response to what Jean-François Lyotard called the decline in grand narratives, which is perhaps not unrelated to what Jodi Dean and other Lacanians call the decline in symbolic efficiency: In the Lyotard version, there’s a loss of faith in an underlying story of historical time, particularly its Marxist form, but perhaps also liberal-capitalist grand narratives of progress tied to reason, technology,  peaceful trade, and consumer comfort.3 Azuma thinks that what replaces the grand narrative “behind” the text or the screen of the individual work is a database.

Outline, Failure (or success) in its contexts

In the three chapters of my thesis, I point out how the definition of failure (or success) changes in different times of my life and ideologies.
In the first chapter, I report on my failures as a child growing up in China - 1995 to the first 10 years of the 2000s - whose emphasis as a country, rested on the grand narrative of nationalism and economic growth. The image of failure (or success) manifests here as propaganda and brainwashing education in the format of texts as slogans on banners, set with simple standards.
The second chapter demonstrates my failure as a burnout creative who is suffering from the neoliberal market, as well as the counterforce behind my gentrified lifestyle. In this position I am part of a profit-orientated market that shows an image of failure (or success), eventually pointing to what has been propagated as valuable under Romanticism and Consumerism. Meanwhile, I address the question of how the creative industry stimulates gaining profit through images. Eventually, I will argue that Bohemia is funded by the bourgeoisie to criticize the bourgeoisie.
The last chapter is my biggest failure. Here, I criticize all the symbols of success I could get my hands on in relation to the failed representation of the Other while self-becoming the other. The excessive display of positivity while in the same tone, revealing violence of the same in others in the physical space, adds to the concerns mentioned in the previous chapter of how the algorithms and surveillance on the digitized public space, are built based on the principles brought in by those who make the infrastructure, and facilitate for it to be built. In the end, I ask who is the Other.

The underlying stories of determined success in three chapters:

1. Self: the obeying of the disciplines (Banners/childhood / as a self )

2. The profit and interests (Advertisements / young professional / as a self )

3. The positivities (the exclusion of the other) in the content and also logic(algorithm) - (digital/social media/questioning identity through the experience of being ‘the other’ towards here and now)

Failure(or success) as a process and an expectation - in the regarding of time

From the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became major players in the theatre of the human mind.4

Failure (or success) as a process or an expectation, reflects how time has been playing its role in the development of imagined orders as well.

In the context of grand narrative failure(or success) as a phenomenon, it can be seen as the underlying truth based on a massive practice which leads to a (expected) destination. In the context of Chinese socialism, the aim is clearly to intensify the autocracy of the Chinese Communist party and maintain its order. While the liberal-capitalist grand narratives emphasize technology, peaceful trade and consumerism, comfort in a way, economic growth. The last two chapters I concentrate on what Azuma calls “database” - the database that is made out of uncountable personal narratives in the shape of digital media.  As Han Byung Chul wrote: the digital medium knows nothing of age, destiny, or death. Time itself is frozen: it is a timeless medium. The disappearance of the temporal order reveals no more clear standard or underlying truth of failure (or success) but just a database which I have a glimpse through algorithms. Eventually, Failure is not the opposite of success. It calls success into question, through a complex relationship to happiness.