Dr. Mi You: Silk as a currency

Combining hearsays, histories and speculations, Dr. Mi You talk focus on silk both as an artefact and as cultural metaphor. Desired by the Romans, silk in the antiquity was surrounded by trickery, theft and outlandish cultural imaginations, so popular that it was preferred as a medium of exchange in Central Asia than gold coins issued by the Kushan empire. In China, silk was variously used in lieu of tax, wage and tributary payments. This then opens up a reflection on silk as a currency today, both in the cryptoworld for cross-border transactions and as a cultural currency, seen, for example, in ‘silkpunk’.

Dr. You Mi is a curator, researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Her long-term research and curatorial projects spin between the two extremes of the ancient and futuristic. She works with the Silk Road as a figuration for deep-time, deep-space nomadic imageries and old and new networks/technologies. Under this rubric, she has curated programs at Asian Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016), and with Binna Choi, she is co-steering a research/curatorial project “Unmapping Eurasia” (2018-2021). At the same time, her interests in politics around technology and futures led her to work on “actionable speculations”, articulated in the exhibition, workshops and sci-fi-a-thon “Sci-(no)-Fi” at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (2019), as well as in her function as chair of committee on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational political NGO Common Action Forum. She is one of the curators of the 13thShanghai Biennale (2020-2021).
Her academic interests are in media theory and performance philosophy, science and technology studies, as well as new and historical materialism. She is fellow of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), member of the Academy of Arts of the World(Cologne), and serves as director of Arthub (Shanghai) and advisor to Institute for Provocation(Beijing).

The podcast is part of the series KNOT KNOW exploring craft's potential for building solidarity and queering beliefs across Central Asia and China. The program and podcast is supported by Bezirkskulturfonds im Bezirk Mitte.
Audio editing by @berlinology.