Projection — An Artistic View of Human, Urban, Social Fields and Mindsets

Fields and Mindsets
The realities of a field, constructed by all members of
a society in accordance with logic and requirements
specifically placed on them, are the setting in which
individuals accordingly partake in social activities.
A field is not immutable; rather, it possesses a
multiplicity of dimensions — be it human, material
or natural — formed by and among individuals or
groups. Fields have no borders, interact with each
other, and expand and enrich themselves all the time.
None of any participants within a field knows how
to define clearly its own borders and its properties.
Nevertheless, we do know how to act within the field
to which we belong.
The realities of mindsets, in relation to the complex,
ever-changing and never-the-same fields to which
we adapt ourselves, are significantly different from
each other in terms of capacities of comprehending,
adapting to and controlling the fields. How to
resist in and, in the meanwhile, integrate ourselves
into a field very much depends upon how our
psychological and biological functions are launched
to run, as well as how our emotional mechanisms
are to refract. The realities of fields are the source
of that of mindsets and, in turn, the latter are
the reflection of the former. For each individual,
what they perceive as realities are in actuality
the realities of mindsets, or in other words, are
the “realities of fields” that have been processed
through psychologies; such a reality is thus rather
an experiential reality gained by them.
The Yet-to-Know and the Yet-to-Come
While technologies improve, urbanization expands,
societies progress and cultures permeate…the mutual
struggles between fields and mindsets become
increasingly intensified whereas the distance in between
them continuously increased. As Pierre Bourdieu puts
it, “Each field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of
struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of
forces…between the dominators and the dominated.”
The process of defining properties and borders of a field
always involves antagonisms among different powers,
individuals, organizations, environments, etc., and
always results in the diverse and complex realities of
fields as well as of mindsets, which interact and compete
with one another, with an outcome of stratified layers of
social forms and their subordinated cultural forms.
The internal and the external, the pragmatic and the
idealistic, the dynamic and the static, the subjective
and the objective, the two-dimensional and the multidimensional,
etc., are all of the historical concepts and
logics under the schematic dichotomy. To break through
such a dichotomy is aimed by this exhibition, and
specifically — with the aid of enlightenment of ancient
wisdoms, of VR and other contemporary technologies
and media, of human, city and society as reading objects,
and of “projection” (the theme of this exhibition) — by
exploring into the possible new dimensions and new
logics of future ways of thinking, by examining the
innovative mindsets, situations and states potentially
embedded in the established simple dichotomies, for
example, between academics and arts, commonsense and
knowledges, time and space, and by tracing the relations
between the realities of fields and that of mindsets.
Projection, as a theory in psychology, was conceptualized
by Sigmund Freud in 1894 for purpose of analyzing
and understanding “the speaker’s inner world.” In
psychoanalysis, projection is an ego defense mechanism
to protect oneself from feelings of guilt, which arise
because our superego becomes too demanding. It is
considered that in projection thoughts, motivations,
desires, and feelings that cannot be accepted as one’s
own are dealt with by being “projected” onto someone
else, or “projected” onto other agents in the social fields.
One can “project,” by following the direction of their
subjective needs and sensitivities, their personal traits
onto others and outside surroundings — in this sense,
the projection generates a process that is interactive.
With a strong interest in the coming future, with
enlightenment of new ways of thinking, and by the aid
of new technologies, we (me and participating artists)
hope this exhibition will be able to open up the mouth
towards a journey during which humans constant
“Etherealization ”will be manifested, be approached in
terms of what it is, how to react and how to adapt to it.