Over the phone from the supply closet at SFMOMA, Wu Tsang confesses she was never interested in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick growing up. She is busy overseeing the installation of a newly acquired work, “Of Whales,” one of many moving parts in a sweeping project conceived in conversation with the famously challenging novel. Though many would only dare open such a daunting text in the safety of the classroom, she decided to plunge Moby Dick’s depths after attending a talk exploring a Marxist reading. Curious about where a post-colonial reading might take her, she began researching what became a wellspring of inspiration.
Soon, buds of ideas blossomed into an inter-disciplinary journey manifesting as a film and two video installations that have traveled from New York’s Whitney Museum to the Venice Biennale, to Berlin’s Gropius Bau and most recently, to San Francisco. She’s dived into this multi-pronged vision alongside many thought partners and collaborators like the poet Fred Moten, designer Telfar Clemens, the artist ensemble Moved by the Motion and VIVE Arts, an organization pairing artists with the resources they need to experiment with virtual reality.
Supporting her work with game engine technology, VIVE Arts helped Wu imagine the ocean from the perspective of the mysterious, seductive, uncatchable whale that manages to eternally evade Captain Ahab’s grasp. As we continued our conversation, the artist shared more about “Of Whales”, her favourite passage from Moby Dick and her thoughts on the metaverse.
This is such an expansive project that you’ve been working on! There’s a feature film, a video installation at The Whitney Museum and another video installation that has moved from the Venice Biennale to Gropius Bau in Berlin and has now been acquired at SFMOMA. Did I get it all right?
You nailed it!
I would also add that I work very collaboratively, and the projects are different iterations of collaboration. For example, the installation in the Whitney Biennial is actually a collective work by Moved By The Motion, which is a company and ensemble that I’ve worked with in Zurich.
The piece in Venice was something more of my own direction, also with some of the collaborators. The feature film is also a thing that I directed with the collaboration of Moved by the Motion and the theater, the Schauspielhaus, where we are all currently doing a residency.
I always feel like that often gets missed — art is often very much a conversation with a lot of collaborators.
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Speaking of the way that ideas move and travel — your interest in Moby Dick was piqued at a talk given by your friend Laura Harris on the work of CLR James, a scholar of this classic novel. I’ve read you were interested a post-colonial reading, but can you say more about what inspired you to adapt it?
Moby Dick is one of the great American novels, so for me as an artist that often tries to focus on marginalized history, or hidden history, you know, stories about people who don’t usually get depicted or celebrated in mainstream history — Moby Dick is not the kind of novel I would usually go for.
Growing up it wouldn’t have been a book that I thought, Oh that’s for me, that’s a book that tells my story. And actually, it is quite a problematic book from the perspective of how it depicts people. It’s very of its time, it stereotypes and racializes all the people of color in the story. It’s a very complicated book, but it’s also a very interesting way to think about race in America and a moment in time right before the Industrial Revolution.
It’s kind of like a snapshot of American society at the time that is also a way to talk about the present. We are still living in a society that is on a mad quest to extract all the oil from the earth. To produce and fuel a modernizing, expanding society that’s literally destroying the planet.
I find sometimes with books, there could be a phrase or a visual that that sticks — that you can’t get out of your head. I’m wondering if there were any moments like that for you?
There is a chapter called “A Squeeze of the Hand,” and this passage where all the sailors are on deck and they’re having to break down the whale blubber because it has all these globules in it. They have to crush it with their hands so that it can be rendered into oil.
They’re squeezing the blubber, and then they get so lost in this ecstasy of squeezing the blubber that they start squeezing each other’s hands. They can’t even tell whose hand is whose. That image, and the language around that passage is really what sparked the whole project in a way.
I’m curious about what it means to you to move the installation around the world. How are you thinking about the environment and acoustics? Are there new opportunities and possibilities that have popped up in this new space?
Absolutely. The unfolding of the project, it traveling to these other venues, is really like discovering the work in different ways.
One major discovery for me: when I installed the work in Berlin it was a massive location, right? The screen didn’t feel that big to me. It was the right size for the space, but it was so dispersed. Depending on where you stood, you might be near one or two speakers and you could hear the music echoing off the walls. It was really ambient and there were always people walking by and it was a diffused kind of experience.
What I’m discovering here in San Francisco, is that it’s so much more intense because you can stand in the center of the room, where the audio kind of swirls around you. It’s more cinematic.
I wanted to talk about your collaborators — VIVE Arts in particular. Can you talk about the development of their technology and how it’s helped you to expand your practice?
”Of Whales” is the first VR-based work I’ve ever done. My art practice up until now has just been as a filmmaker. It’s been a really eye-opening experience because it’s such a different process. VIVE was really a key supporter of me taking my first step into the medium. It really would not have been possible without their support. That’s been amazing for me.
This work at SFMOMA is created using a game engine called Unity. There are these big computers that are generating the ocean environment in real-time. It’s not something that we captured and edited. It’s more like a window to a world where we’re seeing all of these things that are kind of choreographed and they just keep happening iteratively, which is exciting to me as a filmmaker because it’s a totally different way to create images.
With filmmaking, it’s so much about the capture of the image and you’re recording something and you’re framing it compositionally with the camera. This is much more theater — you’re creating the environment and all the parameters for things to happen, but then you don’t really have control so much over how they happen. You can only control it to some degree and then you have to let them live in the environment. Somehow feels more alive.
At the risk of throwing out a very overused term, how does your experience with this technology make you feel about the possibilities of the metaverse? Does it excite you? Does it bore you?
I’ve always felt quite, wary of the idea of the metaverse. I don’t know if this is just my perception, but I feel there is a false optimism that’s often attached to these kinds of technological innovations. Oh, if this is what we can do now, just think what we can do in 10 years!
But for me it, literally becomes like an ouroboros, something eating itself. Because the more we can do, it’s still just a reflection of our human consciousness. So it’s always gonna be limited in that sense. It’s always going to be a reflection of the world that we can conceive. Even if we set the parameters for things to be randomly generated, there’s still a human, somewhere, telling the computer what to do.
To me, that is not optimistic. That’s just sort of another iteration of human problems, which I actually don’t find to be a bad thing in itself. There’s this chapter in Moby Dick called “The Chart” where Ahab is obsessively mapping the migration of the sperm whales because he’s trying to find Moby Dick in this massive, vast ocean. That kind of obsessive quest feels like a mirror of what VR is. We’re obsessively mapping a universe, but that universe is still just our conception of the universe.
It’s almost funny to me the idea that VR has limitless possibilities because to me it does not. It just becomes another way to talk about what it means to be a human, which I think is endlessly, infinitely interesting. That’s why we make art, you know. To try to understand what it means to be human.