Shaoling Ma is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore where she teaches global Chinese literature and culture, media studies, and critical and literary theory. Her first book, The Stone and the Wireless, Mediating China 1861-1906 is published with Duke University Press (2021).
In Liu Chuang’s three-channel video “Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities” (2018), decentralized networks of cryptocurrencies appear to amplify the inherent heterogeneity of the conceptually and regionally bounded entity known as Asia. Drawing upon James C. Scott’s work on zomia, the highland region connecting Southeast Asia, the People’s Republic of China, and the Indian subcontinent, the 40-minute video traces the historical tensions between Han Chinese state capital, private investors, and the lived experiences of ethnic minorities whose homes in remote mountainous areas offer cheap hydroelectricity that power the recent cryptocurrency craze. Paradoxically, a decentralized currency relies on centralized power and energy systems, which are in turn made possible by existing networks of railway and telephone infrastructures. My paper leverages Liu’s emphasis on infrastructural materiality in order to remedy what I see as intermediality’s tendencies to focus on information at the expense of energy and labor. Through an understanding of how currency, digital or otherwise, is also media—if not the historical medium that undergirds the production, circulation, and consumption of the more recognizable audiovisual media—we re-endow intermediality with its social character that is not limited to the technological. At the same time, the video’s focus on the historically exploitative extractions of natural resources re-grounds the concept of inter-Asia, which has highlighted the regional and sub-regional, in the earthly, global commons of the Anthropocene. I argue that the relation between intermediality and inter-asia will continue to be critically productive so long as both concepts tend equally to the materiality of centralized power and energy systems, as well as to the ephemerality of decentralized informational networks. Through the endangered Sino-Tibetan language of Muya that serves as the narrating voice-over, and titular field recordings from ethnomusicologists’ long interests in these minorities, “Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities” also reminds its viewers that crypto-mediums of exchange and circulation nonetheless leave audible traces.