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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

These installations express the transience of our sensory world, the impermanence of form, and the artificiality of our environment Progress in technology leads to a corresponding divide between our hyperlinked existence and an increasingly distant natural world Without fantasising about a post-industrial return to the land, this series proposes a network of evolutionary forms that act as a surrogate for nature By using technology appropriate to each project, the slow interaction between the installations and their audience echoes our former relationship with the environment The work proposes what an installation can be, rather than what it should be It draws on the idealism of utopia, but without grandiosity or dictatorial rules The literal translation of utopia as ‘no-place’ suggests it has many parallels in digital culture, with computer engineers appropriating the terms ‘installation’ and ‘architecture’to make the non-space of data and information more tangible   The projects combine digital and analogue media to translate the Baroque ‘total work of art’ (gesamtkunstwerk) into a form appropriate to our electronic age To create these hybrid environments, the installations overlay a series of physical and virtual skins onto their surroundings The entry into this world can be defined physically – by an enclosure, a quality of surface, a sculptural form, or a reversal of interior and exterior space; it can also be entered through a perceptual shift – a change in acoustics, the sensation of colour, a feeling of immersion, or an awareness of gravity   This world-within-the-world can offer visitors the freedom to dream (and not merely the freedom to obey, as in utopia) In Paris, Walter Benjamin had similar places for waking reveries, zones populated by ‘the dream-houses of the collective: arcades, winter-gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railroad stations’  For us, these installations can augment our waking life with a zone of suspended disbelief – a space where we can synthesize the fragmented world outside   Several of these images were published in The White Review No 1  To see more of Lawrence Lek’s work, visit wwwlawrencelekcom

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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feature

December 2012

Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim

Dylan Trigg

feature

December 2012

The title of my essay has been stolen from another essay written in 1919.[1] In this older work, the...

poetry

May 2013

Ad Tertiam

Saskia Hamilton

poetry

May 2013

Rows of pines, planted years ago – so many, were you to count them on your fingers, you would...

poetry

September 2011

The Moon over Timna

Rikudah Potash

TR. Michael Casper

poetry

September 2011

In a copper house Lived the new moon, The new moon Of Timna. In a copper coat With a...

 

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