To Zihan Fu(Zephyr):
*This version was updated on March 26 as a revision, offering clearer articulations and raising additional questions—it is may not a final submission.
I’m really glad to have the chance to revisit your curatorial project—we briefly talked about it before.
Your exhibition is a critically ambitious experiment on intimacy. From “generating and burning keywords through alcohol consumption” (Week 5) to the “tactile metaphor of power in sandpaper and tape” (Week 6), you gradually built a multi-layered, evolving spatial theatre. I’m particularly pleased with your revisions in Week 8, where you streamlined the process. As we’ve discussed, overly complex mechanics can undermine the clarity of your curatorial message. You not only adjusted the structure, but also made a clear declaration about this shift—well done!
（In fact, I especially admire your Week 6 observation: “This is not liberation, but a meticulously designed power game—technology becomes the new curator, and the audience becomes complicit through the expenditure of body heat.” This mirrors Claire Bishop’s critique in Artificial Hells of “passive freedom” in participatory art, and inverts Nicolas Bourriaud’s ideal of “touch as an egalitarian bond.” Through sandpaper and adhesive tape, you effectively revealed how touch can comfort—but also harm. It’s a bit of a pity that this tactile layer was dropped in the revised plan, but I understand it was a necessary and reasonable decision.）
From your descriptions, I can clearly imagine a curatorial field charged with anonymity, thermal sensors, and data self-destruction, where “intimacy” becomes something touchable, perceivable—even capable of lashing back. The entanglement between body, technology, and emotion allows the exhibition to reflect not only closeness through heat, but also the consumption and control hidden within it.
That said, I believe there are still TWO areas for improvement:
1. How does your curatorial mechanism convey your core ideas?
Your project might benefit from reconsidering the audience’s threshold for understanding. Your theoretical integration is rich and well-structured—from Erika Balsom’s reflections on the temporality of moving images (Week 8), to Boris Groys’ view of the audience as the “trigger of the event” (Week 6). However, the exhibition shifts rather quickly between “the physicality of intimacy” and “the temporality of digital power,” especially the jump from heat imaging to periodic data cremation. This could dilute your curatorial focus—not just in terms of expression, but also in thematic coherence.
Do you perhaps need supporting materials like a curatorial booklet or didactic panels to articulate this conceptual shift? Are you more focused on observing intimacy and relational behavior—or on curating its “thermal death”? (I’m using the physics term here—meaning the eventual exhaustion of heat, the descent into cold stasis—I think it’s a very COOOOOL metaphor!) You might consider ways to strengthen the conceptual bridge between these two dimensions.
2. How feasible is the participatory structure?
You may also want to further reflect on the practicability of your process. As Shannon Jackson writes in Social Works, the ethics of participatory art lies not in constructing barriers, but in building “supportive structures.” The tiered model introduced in Week 6—where participants must first finish a drink (“Frida’s Vein”) to unlock a Wooclap QR code, and only then access the anonymous dialogue booth—does respond to Claire Bishop’s idea of “antagonistic participation,” but it might also create unnecessary exclusion.
While your revisions in Week 8 helped simplify this structure, a few procedural concerns remain. After all, this is still a bar. When you transform it into a curatorial space, it still carries its original identity. Who are your participants—visitors who came specifically for the show, or casual customers who might just want a drink?
How do you plan to guide those accidental participants into your framework, instead of letting them drift away due to fatigue, confusion, or disinterest? Your design relies on both participation and consumption—but if a participant chooses not to follow the full path, how will it affect their experience? Also, how do you intend to acquire the equipment and software necessary for features like the “Power Fingerprints” or the “Digital Ashes Altar”? Are there precedents for this type of interaction, or at least some proof of feasibility?
Overall, this is an incredibly mature, original, and critically sharp curatorial proposal. It not only challenges the boundaries of exhibition-making, but also those of emotion itself. I’m excited to see how you continue developing the ethical questions of “temporary power” in future work.
References:
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Balsom, Erika. After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
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Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso Books, 2012.
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Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002.
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Groys, Boris. “Art as Event.” In Going Public, 41–49. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.
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Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge, 2011.
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My Comparative Reflection on Curatorial Practice
In contrast to Anonymous Intimacy, which explores the emotional flows of the digital age through multi-sensory participation and data self-destruction mechanisms, Play and Pay adopts a format closer to traditional exhibition structures. It establishes video games as a legitimate medium of contemporary art through a curatorial logic focused on the game-capital relationship.
Both projects deal with themes of interactivity and structural violence, but their starting points differ: the former emphasizes the bodily embedding and data reverberations of individuals within systems, while the latter critiques the system itself—its narratives, devices, and monetization models. Although Play and Pay successfully illustrates how capital drives the game industry, its critical approach remains more indirect when compared to the bodily immediacy of Anonymous Intimacy, where the mechanisms themselves generate a visceral response.
In the future, if Play and Pay could further activate player identity and experiential differences through well-designed didactic panels, it might establish a clearer curatorial personality between academic discourse and sensory experience.
That said, Play and Pay also faces issues of procedural flow. Participants may not follow the intended sequence—they might just play the games without reflecting, skip the texts, or leave quickly. Some may not even understand video games at all, making the entire experience hard to access.
Perhaps the mechanisms could be refined by using more direct, interactive strategies to guide visitor behavior (without becoming overly complex). Spatial design might also establish a more coherent route to ensure visitors have a complete experience. But this also risks feeling authoritarian—like the curator has become a control freak!
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