Online performance.
Duration: 1 hour
Performed as a part of the opening event for ‘Till we meet again IRL. Best wishes, Asia-Art-Activism’, a digital programme by Asia-Art-Activism, supported by the Bagri Foundation and Arts Council England.
Towards All & Nothing (in reflection) is a piece of live art entirely on Google Docs that recollects and reimagines Fung’s ‘Towards All & Nothing’, a performance drawing created in 2019 as part of the live programme Being Present (curated by Annie Jael Kwan) that was in response to the exhibition, Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition, co-curated by Hammad Nasar and Kate Jesson. It was fundamentally a work about remembering and came out of Fung’s research on the life and work of Li Yuan-Chia.
Screenshots by Cuong Pham and Naz Brown.
With Covid-19 and lockdowns suspending live performances, Fung became curious about other ways of presenting and creating live art online, particularly thinking about the ability to experience liveness and feeling presence online. She decided to experiment with Google Docs, an online word processor that enables multiple users interacting simultaneously on the same document, and using its infinitely expanding white rectangular pages as a site for performance.
In this work, Fung explored the sense of liveness and connectedness in cyberspace and attempted to connect with audience across different points in geographical space and time (zones) via typing and mark making in real time on Google Docs. Audience encountered recollections and fragments from her research and documentation of 'Towards All & Nothing' and were encouraged to contribute and interact with the materials in this performance space. As the original performance drawing, this work continued to contemplate on the idea of legacy and disappearance but from an online perspective, looking at what gets altered or updated, deleted or replicated whilst records of these actions are simultaneously logged and archived in the Version History of the document.
The Google Docs document, in which the performance took place, is available for viewing here.