Scroll
“Book from the Sky",” Xu Bing
At the tail end of the summer, we’re back with Fossil Poetry, writing about the word “scroll” & how the digital version differs from its analog predecessors — Ling on the intimate revelation of the Chinese hand scroll and Sophie on the mystical unfurling of the Dead Sea scrolls.
YL: Chinese paintings, unlike their Western counterparts, were often painted not on canvas but on hand scrolls: ancient Buddhist narratives on long sutra scrolls, intricate ink landscapes on delicate silk scrolls, Chinese characters on massive scrolls draping across from the ceilings of a contemporary art museum.
Much like scrolling through an Instagram feed, the act of viewing a Chinese hand scroll, is continuous and unfolding. To read the scroll, you move from image to image, caption to caption, across time, space and history.
But unlike the digital newsfeed, and unlike the fixed canvas, scroll paintings were not meant to be hung on walls or blasted online for endless public consumption. When not being viewed, the scroll remained rolled up, tied together, stored away.
The experience of viewing a scroll was ceremony, anticipation and revelation: as you unrolled, you had no idea what came next; each section was a delight. Revisiting a handscroll was like revisiting an old friend that you had not seen in a while, not rechecking the profile of an acquaintance that you’d checked yesterday.
What would it mean to scroll through a social media feed like one would view a Chinese handscroll? What would that experience feel like — not of the constant chatter and exhausting drone of our 21st century social panopticon, but of the rare treat of revelation and reconnection?
SH: The Dead Sea Scrolls look almost too fragile to unfurl, in pictures from one site of discovery. They’re rolled up like decaying prehistoric roses, preserved in caves for 2,000 years—soon to be meticulously unfurled and studied and disputed and airplaned all over the world for special exhibits. What seems magical about these scrolls, besides their long unsettled life in caves for thousands of years, is that moment of delicate unfurling, the care taken not to break the fragile paper, the great reveal. The scroll’s architecture allows for the conceal of a powerful secret, and then its slow, careful revelation, like a flower.
Perhaps this is why the world “scroll” retains a quasi-mystical aura, even after it’s been co-opted by computing. As a verb, it still contains the possibility of a reveal: you scroll up or down in hopes of finding something—a piece of information, a particular photo, or just something that catches your attention on the endlessly rolling screen. Scrolling is a physical act, a movement of the fingers across a screen or on a touch-pad mouse, but it feels different from reading a book or magazine. There is no page to turn because the screen-page keeps on going and we keep on scrolling.
The infinite scroll of the internet is often more deadening than revelatory; we know that Twitter is a bottomless pit of jokes and opinions and memes and thoughts, so our scrolling is more like fishing with our hands in a murky stream than like unrolling an ancient religious document. Scrolls, the physical kind, are powerful precisely because they are self-contained—narrative, often visual worlds, that have a beginning and an end--all for us to discover. The scroll of the internet is simply a slow unraveling.
Reading and writing:
SH: For The New Yorker, I wrote about how emoji become emoji! For The New York Times, I wrote about the fraught concept of a digital museum and whether social media can open up private collections. also wrote about Apple’s foray into AR and art; a show that combines biotechnology and art, including a literal virus in the gallery; and how art has changed since Apollo 11. Last but not least, for the now-terribly-sadly-gone Topic Stories, I wrote about background music and our increasingly loud world. I will recommend that everyone read Carolyn Forché’s book, What You Have Heard Is True, which is probably the best nonfiction book I’ve read all year.
YL: Finally got around to publishing this piece in Foreign Policy Magazine about the future of education in China in the age of AI. Wrapping up a long form piece of narrative non-fiction on a Chinese social networking app, with the support of the Matthew Power Grant. On the bookshelf: Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, Matt Sheehan’s The Transatlantic Experiment and Peter Hessler’s The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution. And most importantly, any writing that is attempting to cogently and productively engage with, wrestle with and synthesize the current situation in Hong Kong. (Please send the best that you have read.)