Liu Chuang Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities

NARRATOR:

Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities is a video work made by Liu Chuang in 2018. This forty-minute, three-channel installation is presented in colour and features audio in multiple languages.

Three screens are arranged horizontally in a row and play different videos. The work addresses subjects ranging from anthropology and nature to history, technology, and finance. The work integrates still images, animation, and recorded footage. It often shows the same object from different perspectives across the three screens. The voiceover narration is in the Muya language interspersed with Hakka and English. The narrative is accompanied by sounds and music that connects to what is shown on the three screens and links them together. Through this piece, Liu examines crypto mining activities around hydroelectric plants in China during the 2010s and their impact on the Zomia region, which includes southwestern China and Southeast Asia.

The work begins with scenes of Chinese buildings. It then zooms in on the electrical wires and utility poles next to these buildings. This is followed by black-and-white footage of telegraph operators tapping out messages by hand. A hand appears on the left screen, plucking electrical wires to the rhythm of the background music as if they were the strings of a guqin, a Chinese instrument. Meanwhile, on the right screen, a hand hovers over a computer touchpad.

In the next shot, the camera pans to a mountainous area with a reservoir, electrical cables, pylons, and a bitcoin mine inside a power plant, cooled by animated fans. The left screen shows a close-up of a water droplet, while the right screen depicts a pen piercing the droplet to write what seems to be the letter ‘B’, for Bitcoin. The camera transitions to the interior of a high-speed train, focusing on a one-yuan coin by the window of the carriage. The right screen zooms in on the coin’s edge, which is engraved with the letter ‘B’. This sequence is succeeded by portraits of multiple Chinese ethnic minorities appearing one after another on all screens.

Next, two hands appear on the left screen, plucking electrical wires, while the other screens show a large bianzhong, an ancient Chinese musical instrument made of bronze chime bells, unearthed from the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Hubei. The instrument is succeeded by footage of nuclear explosions and mushroom clouds. Another hand appears, this time strumming a guitar, and a woman emerges in the middle screen. She appears to be an ethnic minority, with multiple gold piercings in her ear. She is singing into a red cell phone in a rural setting. The left screen shows a close-up of her ear, while the middle screen transitions to the interior of a vehicular tunnel, evoking a journey through the human ear canal.

On a mountain peak, a group of people in ethnic minority attire sing and dance in a circle. The middle screen cuts to a large, old-fashioned stereo system, while the adjacent screens focus on the multicoloured lights on the system, flashing to the beat of the music. A scene from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind follows: in a desert landscape, several hundred Indian people sit and sing, while numerous white men in suits walk among them, recording their music. The work cuts to another part of the film, in which humans try to communicate with aliens using light and sound. Shortly after, the screens cut to a scene from a different film, Solaris, which shows the male protagonist describing his encounter with his deceased wife as her appearance and clothing morph constantly.

At the end of the video, a woman faces the camera. She wears an elaborate headdress and a dotted accent on each cheek, but her facial features, clothing, and hairstyle shift continuously. Sometimes, she resembles an ethnic minority in China. Other times, she looks futuristic or resembles extraterrestrial figures, like Queen Amidala from Star Wars. Finally, her various images overlap, blurring her face and identity into an indistinct figure.