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I am delighted to be part of a panel that tests the multilayered and superpositioned space between two states: fiction and reality. Drawing from literature, art, politics, technology and science, the panel looks for ways in which, as William Steward aptly framed it, “nothing is real...that isn’t a fiction.” This contradictory structure is precisely the structure of the inbetween, of the Beta-Real, we explored in the first panel. It is the structure of the doppelganger which is at once you and at once not you. It is not simply ambiguous, but rather ambivalent, a superposition: it is precisely both opposing things at the sametime. Just as in the first panel, the point is not to try to resolve these tensions and oppositions or even to explore their liminality, but rather to understand the superposition of their difference as constitutive elements of reality, and to see them as an invitation to dwell within the space of ambivalent impasse.
(From symposium organizer and Boghosian Fellow Linda Zhang:) Ani Liu amplifies while simultaneously undermining sensual experience. Her work explores the ways in which scientific and technological revolutions shift and shape the experiences of longing, nostalgia, and sexuality. She uses the tools of science and technology in her artistic practice to turn so-called objective truths on their heads by injecting biological impulse with affect.