by Hao Jingfang
THE FAIR
Eko turned his hotel room into a screening room. One whole wall, smooth and clear, adjusted to be opaque, served as the perfect projection surface. Except for when he was out filming, Eko spent all his time in the room, completely immersed in the work left by his teacher on Mars.
Davosky’s films were like nothing Eko had ever seen. His teacher was like a child who asked endless questions in the form of films. He had lost all interest in clichéd techniques and narrative tricks but simply showed his subjects in the most direct manner possible, displaying every detail that struck him as interesting.
To go through Davosky’s films was like reading a journal of those eight years. He wasn’t interested in a chronicle of what was happening to him but wielded the camera as a tool for recording thought, shot by shot. Every shot was a sentence. Many of the recordings were incomplete, and in the archives they were tagged as “unpublicized,” like casual notes or sketches dashed off in a journal. There were, however, twenty completed films of various lengths. None had titles, and all were identified only with sequence numbers.
At the start of one film, the camera focused on a girl in a pink skirt. The camera roamed from left to right, from head to foot, capturing every detail. A voice-over told the audience to pay attention, because this was the last time we would see her. And then the camera rushed toward the girl and the scene faded to black, implying that the viewer had merged with the subject. After that, everything was shot from the perspective of the girl, like a soul locked into a new body, and yet the viewer was constantly aware of the girl’s presence, like a transparent shell wrapped around the camera. The girl then engaged in a series of ordinary activities, but the everyday now seemed unapproachably remote. The camera was at once detached and smug, expressing with precise clarity the sensation of a self-aware consciousness that couldn’t see through the superficial, a self trapped in a shell also called self.
Precision, yes, that was the word to describe every form of filmic expression Davosky attempted and explored.
Before coming to Mars, Eko had suffered a bout of doubt over his chosen profession. Filmmaking was gradually being drained of craft. The popularization of full-fidelity holographic technology meant that anyone was a director, not only of home videos, but also of epic series with elaborate sets that engaged all the senses, including smells, temperature, and humidity, so that a viewer with a special headset could be completely immersed. Filmmakers turned their attention elsewhere. No longer was the focus on details like framing, camera technique, movement, and so on, but all effort was devoted to complicated plots. But Davosky was showing Eko that the best way to speak the language of film wasn’t to focus on novelty but on uniqueness.
Many of Davosky’s films were in fact flats. The limits of two-dimensional film became for him advantages. In one film, the protagonist was a young man who suddenly got the idea of taking a photograph of himself every day right before he went to bed in order to have a record of how he changed. At first, the man needed to set an alarm to remind himself, but eventually it became a habit, a ritual to be followed without thinking every night after eating, talking, and bathing. One day, after getting off work and returning home, the man was bored and decided to look through his photographs. He prepared dinner and poured himself a glass of wine, sat on the couch in darkness, and scrubbed through the photos one by one as they were projected onto the wall. The camera followed his gaze and went to the wall, showing the viewer one photo after another. At first, it was impossible to see any change, but gradually the man aged. The sequence reached the man as he was at that moment, but didn’t stop. Portrait after portrait, the man’s face wrinkled and his back hunched, until finally the sequence stopped with him as an ancient, shriveled figure. Abruptly the camera pulled back to the man sitting in the dark, remote control in hand. He had died from old age, but his dinner remained on the coffee table, untouched. The camera lingered on him, and the silence was filled with the solemnity of Death.
Davosky also made plenty of holographic films. In these, he took advantage of the ability of the technology to greatly magnify minuscule details. In one of his films, the protagonist suffered from a nervous condition that forced him to obsess over the calluses on his hands, constantly fighting the urge to scratch them off. To prevent harming himself, the man tried to divert his attention elsewhere. The hissing of the furnace coming to life in the walls tortured him. He envied those who didn’t seem to be bothered by the imperfection of their hands, and as a result he began to obsess over their hands, and the new obsession tortured him even more. To the viewer, deeply immersed in the holographic milieu, the protagonist’s sensitivity and pain became oppressively magnified. In one scene the protagonist overheard two engineers discussing the potential for a big project to fail, leading to a planetary crisis; and yet, for the viewer, the soul-searing pain of helpless obsession and the calluses on the protagonist’s hands were far more immediate, real, and overwhelming.
Even though Eko was spending practically all his time in the hotel room, he couldn’t finish all the films. He discovered that Davosky was constantly questioning the certainty of life and personhood. With his films, Davosky strove to dissect the details of daily life and to put them back together again, and every aspect of reality was unstable, fluid, capable of being amplified or dissolved. In the process, many meanings faded away, and strange conclusions emerged unbidden.
Eko began to understand why his teacher had chosen to remain on Mars. All of these films, all of these experimental narratives and scenes, had zero market potential on Earth. Davosky was interested in the dissolution of life, an interest that no one needed. What people on Earth craved was pointers for how to live a good life, not pointers for how to live outside of life. On the web, the easiest sort of film to sell was something that satisfied a need: an illusion to provide the comfort of conversation to the lonely, for instance, or something with the fragrance of perfume, the stench of blood, an enigmatic oracle, and scenes of brave heroes saving beauties through valiant struggles. This was the sort of thing that holographic films excelled at. To be sure, films that allowed the antisocial to vent their sentiments also had plenty of consumers, but no one was going to buy Davosky’s creations. It mattered little how intricately or subtly they were constructed—they couldn’t survive in a world dependent on the market.
Davosky had stored all his films in the central archive. After he went back to Earth, Janet became the custodian of his personal space.
Eko wasn’t very clear on the structure or design of the central archive, but he knew enough to understand that it was enormous in capacity. When he had conducted his search, he had headed directly for Davosky’s personal space, but along the way, he got a peek at thousands upon thousands of side branches and passages, like the boughs of an ancient tree. He tried to calculate how much memory it held. If every Martian who had ever lived had a personal space, then there were at least tens of millions of such spaces. Add to that the spaces allocated to the hundreds of thousands of ateliers, the constantly changing public spaces, exhibition spaces, interactive spaces, and the whole central archive was another Mars City, a gigantic virtual metropolis. Everyone’s personal space was like their home, and the city’s electronic forums were like the public squares. The homes were used to store authored creations, while the public forums were for announcements inviting all to visit. It really was like an ancient tree that ever ramified and refreshed itself.
Eko didn’t wander about the larger central archive, mostly because he lacked the time, but also because of Janet Brook’s request.
Please keep this a secret, all right? she had asked him when she handed him the password. Other than Arthur, we’ve never given an outsider access to the central archive. Many things stored there are free and open but important to us. As a custodian, I shouldn’t do this, really. But you’re Arthur’s student, and I think you deserve to see his legacy. Not just his films, but also the world he lived in. She glanced down at her hands, her voi
ce still ragged from crying. I want someone else to help me remember. The archive holds the eight years Arthur spent here, and I’m afraid that when I die, no one will know what he did. You can see whatever you like in his space and even copy his films. But please, keep this a secret, all right?
Absolutely, Eko had promised.
He would tell no one. He had never mentioned his teacher’s secret to anyone either. Davosky had left the most important part of his life here, and he would sustain it with his silence. His teacher had left behind these films, and Janet had unlocked the space in which they were hidden. These were the most precious gifts he had ever received. He wanted to wander through this universe slowly, to truly understand what his teacher had found, to understand the reasons why he had stayed on Mars and then left.
* * *
For Eko, Earth’s unstoppable trend toward the vulgarization of everything was the disease of the twenty-second century. The debasement of knowledge had swept the world since the twentieth century, but back then, remnants of the classical age still survived, and there were still a brave few who lived for grand and noble ideas, for wisdom. By the twenty-second century, however, all nobility had dissolved, and no one cared about the life of ideals. Sight and imagination alike had shrunken to just a few inches in front of the nose. Without the pursuit of higher ideals, civilization itself turned vulgar. This was an illness from which everyone suffered, including Eko himself. He had come to Mars filled with doubt, uncertain if his teacher had found answers here.
Viewed from the perspective of an individual, the world was just a room. She could choose to live her whole life in one room, or she could open a door and enter another. The thought of leaving a familiar room was terrifying, but the passage between rooms took only the blink of an eye. Measured by the conventional yardstick of space, a person was much smaller than a room, but when you measured everything by the individual, a room was simply one tiny part of the stream that was life itself. On a map of time, a person was far grander than a room.
Superficially, there wasn’t much to distinguish the creative life on Mars and Earth. Artists created, publicized their work, attempted to find an audience that loved their creations. But Eko understood the fundamental difference between the two. On Earth, there were also spaces where anyone was free to publish their work, and at a glance the spaces were fair and democratic. But these spaces were like supermarkets, ruled by the iron law of novelty. Every piece of art that entered such spaces was like a bottle of milk with an expiration date. Unless it found a buyer, it would be mercilessly removed from the shelves and thrown away. Three days, or maybe thirty days; commerce or death. Every warehouse aimed to have zero inventory, and every buyer craved the fresh and new. If no one paid attention to some work, then even bits could rot and decay. Theoretically, an author’s work could stay quietly on the shelves indefinitely until discovered by the right audience, but in reality that never happened. Without the promise of a quick deal, there was no one willing to pay for storage. Theodor Adorno once said that “the hope of the intellectual is not that he will have an effect on the world, but that someday, somewhere, someone will read what he wrote exactly as he wrote it.” The hope, some two hundred years after his death, turned out ultimately to be only a mirage.
There was no room for the pursuit of higher ideals in a world dedicated to instant commerce. Eko had survived seven years in such a supermarket, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In an effort to reach for higher ideals, he had taken the risky step of separating himself from the larger market. His films belonged to a much smaller market akin to specialized stores that sold only organic fruits at high prices. By distinguishing themselves from industrial producers, sellers and buyers who transacted there found their own circle of dedicated fans and artists. Like an apple tree grown in the southern part of Kansas, he didn’t bear many fruits, but what he did produce had a special flavor of nostalgia. This was his style, but it was also the result of Theon’s plans. From the start, Theon had cultivated Eko and told him that having a stable base of patrons was the key to selling.
Despite his relatively stable setup, Eko still had to rush about on Earth to serve the market. He climbed skyscrapers and sat at expensive metal desks where he made his pitch to the potential sponsors of his next film. He smoked cigarettes with fashionable flavors with them and, instead of artistic vision, spoke to them of his market share. Twice a week he went on the web to do a meet and greet with netizens, where he put on a pose and hawked his latest products and productized his life. The amount of time he put into these commercial pursuits exceeded the time he spent creating.
But none of this was necessary on Mars. The creators of Mars didn’t worry about making a living, didn’t have to have release plans, didn’t make advertisements, didn’t chase after profit. It was a way of life that Eko couldn’t even imagine, but he found himself deeply drawn to it. For him, to not have to worry about food and rent, to spend all day discussing creation and inspiration, was more ideal than anything else.
Eko wanted to meet with Janet again after he had made his way through all of Davosky’s films. He couldn’t understand why his teacher had left Mars. It was as though a man had escaped to the wilderness, where he built himself a hut and a new life out of the raw material available to him; but then, on the day he was putting the finishing touches on his new home, he decided to move back to the city he had abandoned. A new world was just taking shape as he faded back into the old.
Why? he wondered. Is the passage between rooms a revolving door?
* * *
In the morning, as was his habit, Eko went to the Grand Hall of the Expo Center.
The Expo Center was the tallest habitable building on all of Mars, and it was the main site of the world’s fair as well. All the wonders brought by the Terran delegation were shown there, and the negotiations between the two sides took place in the Council Chamber of the building as well. The Expo Center was architecturally distinct: a five-story pyramid. The Grand Hall took up the entirety of the first floor, and each floor was smaller than the one below it, until one reached the top floor, which consisted only of the Council Chamber.
At that very moment the Terran delegates were deep in negotiations in the Council Chamber while Martians streamed through the Grand Hall, examining the goods from Earth.
Before the world’s fair took over, the Expo Center served the role of a museum of science and technology. Typically the glass columns in Martian houses had pigments mixed in to hide the wires and machinery that kept the houses running. But the Expo Center was different. The Grand Hall had many thick columns, all of which were transparent to reveal the internal machinery, like tanks at an aquarium, or perhaps X-ray photographs of living organisms. Every column was accompanied by a plaque that explained the technology inside, as well as the inventor and a brief history of its evolution. Every feature of the building depended on these machines and circuits: insulation, heating, shielding against cosmic rays, water and air reclamation, and so on. The building was a miniature ecosystem. Eko read the plaques and took photographs, enjoying what he was learning.
On a typical morning Eko carried out his responsibilities as a member of the Terran delegation by shooting some footage of the Martian fairgoers and the negotiations in the Council Chamber. After that, he preferred to wander about the city and capture scenes of Martian life that he found interesting. To be honest, the negotiations bored him. Both sides kept on repeating the same points as though hoping by repetition to convince the other side. A news briefing summary that could be used every day without change would be: Both sides exchanged their views in a friendly manner and continued discussing key points. Anyone familiar with diplomatic negotiations would know that it meant there was no substantive progress.
The Terran delegation’s impressive demands disguised its internal chaos. The wishes of the delegate from one country were often thwarted by the delegate from another. Whatever Antonov had promised one moment would be contradicted by Wang the n
ext. Unlike the united front that prevailed among the Martian representatives, the Terran delegates had no consensus and fought as hard among themselves as they did with the Martians. The economic crisis on Earth had worsened, and technology stocks were plunging in every country, which meant that every nation hoped for Martian technology to get them out of the recession while not benefiting competing nations too much. Eko found the geopolitics tiresome and tried to spend as little time at the Expo Center as possible.
But this morning was different. As soon as he put on the camera glasses, he saw Luoying in the Grand Hall. She was dressed casually and walking together with two other girls her age. Also with them were two boys about thirteen or fourteen.
Eko grew excited. This was a rare opportunity. He knew he wanted to include Luoying in his documentary, but he didn’t want to chase after her like a spy. He had a bloodhound’s nose for the best shots, but he was also as stubborn as a block of hardwood. He despised the idea of filming her in secret, when she was in private spaces; even if such shots sometimes worked better, he refused to contemplate them. Three days earlier, he had seen her at the dance school, but he hadn’t bumped into her anywhere else. She trained hard every day, and he didn’t know how to meet her. He wasn’t even sure if he would get to talk to her today.
Luoying was dressed in a pair of dark gray dance pants—not tights for practice, but comfortable and loose. Over a short blouse she wore a long tunic that swayed in sync with her pants, projecting a relaxed air.
Eko observed her from afar, trying to deduce her personality from her appearance. Her hair was loosely clipped, giving the same relaxed feel as her outfit. She looked as if she didn’t care much about what was around her. Though she was walking with a group, she wasn’t talking much, looking rather absentminded. He didn’t know if this was how she always was or if she was preoccupied today, but he was drawn to her sense of being adrift.