i have been thinking about the phrase “and god created the world in his own image.” i’ve also been wondering about how worlds get made and unmade in everyday life. a weekend of arts festivals prompted this speculation, which is necessarily permeated by the ongoing re- de- construction of shenzhen.

god’s gender provides a useful point of departure for thinking about what it means to create in one’s own image because, of course, there are (at least) two possible interpretations of “image”. image could refer simply to god’s face, snowy white beard and amazingly grecian and white toga. obvious and understandable target of feminist outrage. more interestingly and less exclusionary, image could also mean whatever happens to be going on in god’s head, which opens us to discussions that veer into dream interpretation. if we are every part of our dream, by analogy, god would be every part of the world as it was in the beginning, is now and every shall be…, begging the question: which part of god am i? and oh my god. you, too?

the play between image as what is visible and image as what we think was central to the subtlemob performance piece, as if it were the last time, which i saw saturday evening as part of the microwave new media arts festival.

the title of the piece itself, as if it were the last time is in the subjunctive, the tense where we suspend our disbelief and live the story as truth. the piece was created through the interaction of audience members with each other, a small commercial area of tsuen wan, and the other people in the area. the audience was divided into two groups, “lost” and “found”. both groups were given an mp3 with a mix of music, story, and instructions. throughout the 30-minute piece, the members of the two groups variously performed, watched each other, listened to the music and story creating a cinematic experience in the space.

last time played with both senses of image. on the one hand, none of the performers looked like an actor. on the other hand, in order for the piece to work, audience members needed enough familiarity with audiovisual conventions in order to appreciate what was happening. indeed, one of the more moving effects of this process was how the performance opened me more fully to those around me as if we were part of the same story and therefore the same world.

this spirit of creative exploration continued on sunday, when i enjoyed an afternoon with friends at the shenzhen bay fringe, including fun mime by the trip of mime, a group from hong kong and then participated in the fifth shenzhen pecha kucha night, showing twenty images of the transformation of houhai since 2002. uncanny moment that. the slides were projected onto a screen in the middle of a decorative pond where once was coastal water now a coastal mall. indeed, it was the sense of displacement that foregrounded for me the slippage between images as what appears and images in the mind’s eye. houhai has been razed and reconstructed so many times that there is no there on which to hang a history. the place crumbles away only to re-emerge as another version of modernity from someone else’s sketchbook.

now, i don’t know if our creative conflation of what is and what the mind’s eye sees makes us divine. it would be nice to think so, but my experience in last time has me thinking otherwise. the success of the experience hinged on collaboration, more on the idea that we are all part of god’s unfolding, so to speak and less on the imposition of individual images onto that world. more explicitly, the history of reclaiming houhai teaches that when we impose one image onto the diversity of life, we end up with less life and more pollution, not to mention fewer refuges for spoonbills to nest and mangroves to flourish.

and there’s the ethical rub. it is so difficult to understand myself not as a source of world transformation, but rather as an expression of the world itself and the role i am assigned.