About

This blog tracks the progress of my 2023-2025 Stanford University Faculty Creative Project funded by the Office of the Vice President for the Arts. In lieu of a succinct explanation of the project goals, I include below a copy of the project proposal.

“But we would have gone only in a direction that suited us. We would have gone ahead very slowly, and yet it is not impossible that we would one day have discovered our own substitute for the trolley, the radio, the airplane of today. They would have been no borrowed gadgets, they would have been the tools of our own culture, suited to us.”
Junichiro Tanizaki, as translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker

In the opening section of In Praise of Shadows (1933), Junichiro Tanizaki laments the rapid assimilation of Western technologies in Meiji Era Japan. His proximal cause is domiciliary disruptions rooted in the incongruity of electric lighting and appliances with Japanese architectural aesthetics, but in the epigraph above Tanizaki hints at broader underlying concerns. By comprehensively embracing Western industry at the end of the nineteenth century, did Japanese society (and similarly all East Asia) forsake its potential to develop autochthonous science and technologies that could have coevolved harmoniously with traditional culture? What futures were foreclosed in Japan’s rapid opening to the West?

In a recent lecture at Stanford, science fiction author Ken Liu spoke of stories as the cornerstones of societies and asserted that the sustenance and renewal of a culture depend crucially on each generation retelling its inherited stories in updated and adaptive ways. Liu expressed sharp concerns about Western modernity as an imposed, alien cultural overlay that decoheres life experiences of colonized/subjugated peoples around the globe, with techno-capitalism being the principal vector of that overlay. As a form of creative resistance Liu advocates the exercise of a “technology and literary aesthetic” he calls Silkpunk, which “meld[s] past-reinterpretation with future-hopecrafting” to envision alternative modernities evolved primarily from stories native to cultures outside the dominant Western sphere [1]. In the work of Liu and like-minded writers, Silkpunk is science fiction that reregisters what we presume technology can do across the diversity of magical fantasies global humanity once had. Silkpunk imagines powerful and effective tools peculiar to indigenous cultures – what Tanizaki wistfully longed for – and in so doing helps us feel the contingency and obtrusion of our actual technological regime. As I understand it, Silkpunk strives to retell worlding stories coeval with the origins of indigenous traditional craft, extrapolated many self-determined generations into the future.

My proposal now asks: Must Silkpunk be fictional, and can nonfiction Silkpunk still be art? No form of contemporary technology has greater global reach and influence than computer engineering, which is thus a natural target for the Silkpunk treatment. Can we Silkpunk computing – at some level – for real? The computer as we know it is based on silicon – a semiconducting material with which we have learned to fabricate densely integrated transistor arrays now found at the heart of gadgets as varied as self-driving cars, cell phones, and hypersonic weapons (to update Tanizaki’s list). Recent developments [2] in “soft electronics” suggest that it may be possible to realize key elements of modern computer systems alternatively with silk and indigo replacing silicon as core materials. Engineers have explored these possibilities motivated primarily by prospects for low-cost production of biodegradable flexible electronic circuits, which could be incorporated into clothing or even medically implanted. In my Faculty Creative Project I will develop indigo-silk electronic artefacts as an exercise in Silkpunk.

Indigo-dyed woven fabrics are of course talismanic for traditional East Asian cultures. My aim will be to produce textile artefacts that look like traditional East Asian fabric and are to the greatest possible extent fashioned using traditional craft processes, yet function as information technology “devices” in some meaningful way. Based on preliminary literature studies I believe that a practicable goal would be to develop indigo-silk resistive digital memory (RRAM) fabrics that could store data such as text, audio waveforms, or images in electronically-readable form. Contemporary RRAM architectures are generally based on an electronic element called a memristor, which was originally conceived roughly fifty years ago by a first-generation Filipino-Chinese-American engineer named Leon Chua. I have previously studied unrelated aspects of Chua’s work in my work as an applied physicist, and Chua’s first paper on the memristor concept happens to have been published the year I was born. According to Wikipedia [3], “Chua and his twin sister grew up as members of the Hokkien Chinese ethnic minority in the Philippines under the reign of the Empire of Japan during World War II.” Reading this I am reminded that my own mother was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, and that while Tanizaki’s Japan may have experienced Western technology an invading force it hardly played the role of an innocent victim.

In Praise of Shadows was published just a few years before Chua was born, in an era of surging Japanese militarism and imperialism. From what l know of the history of Meiji Era Japan, it seems reasonable to wonder how much the nationalistic ruling-class fervor that fed the Showa Emperor’s ambitions was kindled – hand-in-glove with the rapid uptake of trollies, radios, and airplanes – by the aggressive military posturing Western powers used to force open Japanese trading ports in the final days of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Could things have been starkly different? What if, instead of opening to the West in the mid-nineteenth century under threat of naval assault (with Commodore Perry’s gunships in Tokyo Harbor), Japan had opened much earlier to “the East” in a spirit of collaboration and co-development? The Korean peninsula, lying just to Japan’s cartographic west, as well as Korean communities under Japanese rule have been habitual targets of Japanese violence and persecution. But there was apparently a period of vigorous cultural exchange and fervent military alliance between Japan and the Baekje Kingdom from roughly the 4^th to mid-7^th centuries AD [4], which was effectively ended in 663 by a decisive defeat of Baekje and Japanese forces by the Silla Kingdom and Tang China in the Battle of Baekgang (Hakusukinoe). What if Baekje and Japan had prevailed and forged a unified culture that the world then left in peace long enough to develop their own sciences – could this have provided conditions for the organic emergence of indigo-silk electronics? What would they have looked like and how would they have been used? I wonder if making actual indigo-silk electronics in the here and now could make that alternative timeline feel just a bit real, reifying a modicum of alternative modernity and longing for a less bellicose history of Japan. What sorts of accounts or records from our own timeline would feel right for such memory devices to embody? Should these textile artefacts be shown in faux-archaeological style, in a sort of Asian-Futurist diorama, or in something more like a shrine?

Questions like these will launch my Faculty Creative Project on SilkPunk Memory Dōgu. (Here the Japanese term Dōgu/道具 signifies tools meant for use in the context of traditional practices such as temple carpentry or tea ceremony, with its use in my Project name meant to suggest that indigo-silk RRAM textiles could be understood as implements for use in some sort of ritual of memory.) In addition to work to realize textile RRAM memory devices, the project will comprise substantial historical research on Japanese-Korean cultural interactions and harms enacted by Japan upon Korean people, to help inform the development of fitting remembrances or memorials to implant in them. My aim will be to create artefacts and an encompassing installation that collectively constitute a Silkpunk enterprise integrating aspects of both speculative fiction and functioning-for-real technology. Though I will rely heavily in this endeavor on my capabilities as an applied physicist, my aim will not be to expand the frontiers of knowledge or to create prototypes of marketable new technology. My aim will be to make meaningful, critical, poetic things that magically and mythically interweave science, history, and traditional “oriental” craft.

[1] http://kenliu.name/books/what-is-silkpunk, retrieved 4 April 2023

[2] D.-L. Wen et al., “Recent progress in silk fibroin-based flexible electronics,” Microsystems & Nanoengineering 7:35 (2021); M. R. Nascimiento, D. h. Vieira, G. L. Nogueira and N. Alves, “Low-Cost, Printed Memristor Using Indigo and a Dispersion of Colloidal Graphite Deposited by Spray Coating,” IEEE Electron Device Letters 42, 1468 (2021).

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_O._Chua, retrieved 4 April 2023

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea_relations, retrieved on 7 April 2023.