Receipts

In this conversation, Immony Mèn and Lilian Leung reflect on the recent project Receipts (2020), which documents the ongoing shadow pandemic of anti-Asian racism. In addition to the direct health impacts of COVID-19, Asian communities are experiencing parallel escalations of racial discrimination and violence, housing precarity and homelessness, and isolation, which disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. Originally presented inside a shipping container at the Bentway, under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, Receipts is a multimodal interface that receives (via voice, video, and text), anonymizes, archives, and performs (on the web and in public) the testimony of people who have experienced or witnessed anti-Asian aggression in public spaces. At its core, this project asks: How can anonymizing testimonies of racist aggression create structures of accountability, solidarity, healing, and community? How can data collection be mobilized as an activist tool, counter to the regimes of surveillance in which it typically operates? The artists hope to build on this prototype in order to develop a more robust and flexible tool that equity-seeking groups can modify and employ to influence political decision-making.

Lilian Leung: Growing up in BC, my Chinese Canadian identity didn’t play a significant role in my life. Of course, Cantonese culture was a large part of my life growing up, but thoughts of belonging and othering have become more present within the past few years. My own work has been centred on learning more about Chinatowns over the past two years—and this endeavour to learn more about Chinese Canadian history has only intensified and broadened now.

Immony Mèn: Receipts assembles stories from individuals who have experienced anti-Asian racism. these testimonies scroll across the screen as Watson (a speech-to-text AI) affirms that these sentiments and actions occur in public spaces, in our neighbourhoods, to our loved ones, to people we don’t know yet. The hypervisibility of faces and the racialization of the pandemic become palpable, and an anonymized voice asks viewers to feel the weight of the participants’ words. Anonymity is key to this project. It applies technologies and processes commonly used to recognize faces, voices, and bodies, and re-envisions them as a way to protect the identity of individuals who wish to share their experiences. We are working on developing a different type of recording—one that uses computer vision, speech-to-text, and character re-enactment—to protect the immigration status, professional networks, and personal relationship of participants. This platform was developed with the intent of offering it to other vulnerable communities outside of the South, Southeast, and East Asian diasporas on Turtle Island. While various forms of movement tracking and artificial intelligence are often used to identify patterns and build racist predictive surveillance, we are also interested in how it could humanize experiences and memories, performing words that I am too familiar with.

LL: I’m often struck by the strange sense of both wanting to be seen and unseen at the same time. And the anonymization of these stories offers something unique: it both provides safety for individuals and absents the body. This gives people an opportunity to voice their own experiences differently, legitimizing that it is not only the most brutal and tragic experiences that should be shared—but the pervasiveness of these experiences as well.

IM: I am physically distant from my family and my home city of Montreal, and in the summer of 2020, I was searching for ways to remain present. The Groupe d’Entraide Contre le Racisme Envers les Asiatiques au Québec were sharing their experiences of increased vulnerability and visibility: at Costco, Korean markets, metro stations, and other familiar locations. In the group’s comments section, strategies were being shared, condolences offered. Participants organized records into social media threads to support identifying actions against offenders. Being in this space inspired me to develop a way to safely record and share testimonies; a space to listen and understand how gestures, bodily fluids (spit), and rhetoric are weaponized; a place to connect with all those who have to think twice about how they move as their bodies become increasingly more vulnerable during this time.

LL: Having spoken with elders in the past year, it’s has been heartbreaking to hear their stories of anti-Asian racism. Many individuals who grew up during the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act—before it was repealed in 1947—felt that fear returning to their lives. These experiences and stories don’t exist in isolation, and there’s been a re-emergence of solidarity between other racialized and marginalized individuals, like the Black community. Though our experiences are our own, a project like Receipts is an opportunity to come together and organize for the changes we want.