Wednesday, Aug 30
I laid in the grass, in a slightly uncomfortable position, waiting for 3 PM to arrive, sunlight spreading evenly and generously on my body. I was half asleep, thinking about how my body always knows when something is about to come to an end.
The cicadas screamed loudly in response, upset about the summer ending. Impending changes dwelled inside me, lingering, circling around, while I try my hardest to close my eyes and “live in the moment”. Everything here had been so bight — Too bright. Too soft. too quiet too nice too beautiful too easy toogoodtobetrue
It was the second to last day of my residency at Wave Farm, a transmissions arts center and FM radio station in the Upper Hudson Valley. I had already done everything I came here to do — worked on my project, livestreamed an hour-long livecoded set on the radio, pre-recorded not one, but two interviews with amazing people, spent time with every installation, even took a little stroll into the woods after dark to conquer my fear… and yet, uneasiness float to the surface of this quietness I’ve experienced all week. A small yet growing balloon of anxiety waits to be released.
Time had already started to warp in funny ways a couple days prior. I could feel the changes clearly. Memories had started to blur, while daylight gradually slipped through my finger tips. For pockets of time I got taken back to NYC as I spent long nights alone, at the residency, re-working tracks for my radio set. All the associated feelings rolled onto shore — the anxiety, the excitement, the tears I cried over the past months, the impending doom that’s waiting for me in Brooklyn, the unresolved tension and conflicts, the events piling up on my calendar, the work left untouched, the time ticking, the love, hate, jealousy, thrill, pain — everything that drove me to the edge and back. Everything that pushed me forward to where I was, a room in the woods, in a moment of brief silence.
July, at some point
One sad night a month back, during one of my hyper-fixated deep-dive sessions, the almighty YouTube algorithm bestowed this gem of a video essay to me, called The Answer is Not a Hut in the Woods
(embed youtube video)
For the next 46 minutes, I listened to this sad British writer man talk about his silly, younger years looking for meaning in the wild, working in a farm in New Zealand one summer, and then years later deciding to hike the Appalachian Trial like all other sad Europeans attempting to find themselves. Across continents and years of time, through encounters, murmurs, doubts, adventures, and lots of reflections on his nuanced feelings, the message he reached at the end was, well, the answer is not a hut in the woods (but is the friends we made along the way or something).
I found myself crying, lying face up on the dirty living room rug and thinking to myself: “I guess I need to hike the Appalachian Trial NOW.”
So I packed my bags-
…lol jk. I’m not a sad British writer man on a self discovery journey. The urge to drop everything for the idea of a hermit Shangri-La does not exist in the dreams of anxious 27 year-old Chinese artists stuck in VISA hell and can be deported at any time. I need to work. I need to prove my worth just to continue staying here. I can’t afford to even look for answers. Also I know — we all know — that there’s no answer. No magical equation to solve all of our mental health squabbles. No amount of seclusion or self-inflicted pain or whatever that turns our brain into a whirling mess will make sense of us, the complex social beings that we are, struggling to understand ourselves and each other. And I know that.
If only it was all that simple.
Quiet, and Sometimes Silent is the name of my project that brought me to Wave Farm. It was about proximity, intimacy, and subtle communication using systems outside centralized infrastructures — re-imagining connection with people around us with small data packets that are sporadic, temporal, fleeting, non-invasive.
I had been exploring LoRa protocol since working on my grad school thesis, as it sits on hobbyist radio frequencies (some hundred megahertz) that are free to use and relatively quiet, comparing to the more commonly utilized protocols like Bluetooth and WiFi on the higher 2.4G frequency.
Now that a year has passed since my first attempt, this prototype version finally feels like it’s working as intended: a pair of battery-operated, pocket-size transceivers that send and receive 1) signal strength, 2) rotational information to and from each other, a couple hundred meters apart.
2 days upon my arrival at Wave Farm, artists Mayuko Fujino and Meredith Kooi came to do 1-on-1 sessions with me, an excuse to range test the devices as well as inviting others to perform this experience.
I wasn’t fully ready. I had Mayuko hold the device and walk into the woods, with very vague intentions explained badly. “Press the button if you want to, and I’ll do the same”, I said. There’s only one button and one screen on each device. Whenever the small yellow LED sparks on my end, I know she’d pressed the button.
She left my sight quickly and was gone for a long time. Whenever the data stopped coming I wondered what she was doing — was she out of range, or did something else catch her attention (later she told me she was looking at birds)? And sometimes I sent her messages just to make sure she was still there. Sometimes she responded, other times she didn’t. There was not much to do except for pressing one button while waiting anxiously.
She explained, in the best way possible, how the experience connected to her as a form of passive communication. Like occasionally checking in with friends and family but not really talk that much, or at all. Like when G-chat used to be a tiny window attached to G-mail, where you could see green dots light up in the peripheral view as an indication of your contacts being online. “Just knowing you were on the other side felt like reassurance,” she said. Is it an introvert thing, or is it universal? We talked about the power of the silent knowing. I was surprised and excited how much could be conveyed through the little buttons at all.
I often think about how we’re small creatures existing on a massive electromagnetic spectrum, surrounded by waves of various length despite not seeing or hearing most of them. Quiet in this sense is like being alone in the woods during these summer nights, where cicadas scream and owls cry so loudly, reletlessly. Yet it still feels like darkness. Silence. Just a small human in a field — until the small yellow LED blinks at me.
Originally I had also planned to have wearable pieces go with the electronics, small mechanisms that flap and fold as the communication happens. I found out half way through that I was missing transistors, which I couldn’t get there. The wearable parts remained standalone prototypes.
It’s so hard to view my projects unironically when they’re incomplete, if not with major sentiments of shame or horror. Oftentimes this is how it is, especially with the intention to pursue art opportunities. There’s no end to the performance anxiety, only jokes and giggles to offset the insecurity. When my friend Johann came visit one afternoon, I told him I was feeling emotional how people at Wave Farm even remotely cared about me and my work, let alone with so much good faith and enthusiasm. “They really bet on me the way Troy bet on it”, I said, only half jokingly.
Being taken seriously is a powerful feeling. And maybe, just maybe, there will be a day when I finally stop feeling like a tired, shiny race horse, constantly running forward, performing perfection in order to be bet on.
Thursday, Aug 31
I had to cut my residency short by a day because I had to move. I’m trying to cook everything I have in the fridge. There’s so much left to do. Even though just a day prior I thought I had done everything, there’s always more hopes and dreams and regrets. I thought about how my mom used to say I could only enjoy half of our trips whenever we travelled because I spend the first 2 days unwilling to go and the last 2 days unwilling to return. Maybe this inertia is why I always have a hard time moving on.
10 minutes was the time I had. After I packed my bag and cleaned the house. Before the car came to pick me up to the train station. 10 minutes left — I could probably still browse one book. Listen to one radio. Eat some more food. Run to look at Pond Station one last time.
I thought about all these possibilities in my head, and sat down right where I was, legs brushing through the grass. Sunlight spreading evenly and generously on my body.
I know the answer is not a hut in the woods. But what if it somehow is? Not THE grand answer to anything specific. Just partially, insignificantly, some small answers to some bigger, unanswerable things. Like how I can remember things now. Like how I’m not afraid to leave. Like how 10 minutes can make such a difference sometimes.
:,) Thanks for reading this far. If you’d like to read (even) more, here’s a really awesome write up about my project in the Institute of Network Cultures, by the amazing Natasha Chuk. Happy fall. Take care! Talk to you soon!
Ok bye (⁎⁍̴̛ᴗ⁍̴̛⁎) ✧