REIMAGINING CHINATOWN by Linda Zhang

[kurtkraler]

Reimagining Chinatown: or how to remember the future

When we remember the past, we are constantly re-membering it back together again. Taking fragments of recollections, and re-collecting them again in new constellations, creating new meanings and new memories. In this way, remembering is actually an act of imagination. And in reimagining the future of Chinatown, we begin by re-collecting the past in order to imagine a more generative and expansive collective future. And in this project in particular, we began from recollecting archival documents of Toronto’s Chinatowns from the City of Toronto Archives as well as making a record of present day Chinatown West and Chinatown East with 3D scanning. Through re-collaging these materials, we hope to inspire collective social dreaming to bring these futures back into the present moment to find a footing here, today, to start to be the seeds of change for the future yet to come.

This project started from trying to put hard-to-access heritage technologies into the hands of the public and especially in the hands of Chinatown community members. We started from 3D scanning, which has quickly become the standard way to document and digitally preserve historically significant buildings within the architectural heritage and conservation industry. However, the current cost of 3D scanning at an architectural scale is still prohibitive to the public as well as community stakeholders. Generally, what buildings get 3D scanned remains governed, determined and commissioned by institutional organizations. To this end, reimagining ChinaTOwn aimed to put this emerging archival tool literally into the hands of the community so they could tell and record their own stories, their own heritage. We started with a Build Your Own Chinatown Game, where community members could pick up 3D prints and 3D scans of Toronto’s Chinatown East and West and literally build their own future Chinatown based on what they deemed as important heritage elements. This also became a way of collecting research data on what things mattered to community members in terms of heritage.

We then began to explore how other kinds of heritage technologies might impact how we envision the future, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI). We began by mapping in VR all of the archival materials we could find about Chinatown from the City of Toronto Archives. These were for the most part found in fragments and not easily searchable or catalogued. In our open-access VR space, we organized these materials visually by Chinatown location and across time to more easily be able to access, compare and draw connections between the materials.
Access the archive here: https://www.myseumoftoronto.com/program ... histories/

Today, in the built environment, virtual reality is still predominantly used by real estate developers to sell new developments, which often displace communities like Chinatown. In our work, we hope to explore how these technologies could be subverted and used to support and empower communities. Against this backdrop, we began to build VR worlds reimagining what Chinatown could be in 2050 based on speculative fiction stories written by community authors in 2020. In contrast to the types of stories being told in the news and in the media about Chinatown and Asian Canadians in the early months of the pandemic, community members took part in a series of workshops through which they wrote short speculative fiction stories imagining what Toronto’s Chinatowns might look like 30 years after the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. Over 60 community members and facilitators came together to reimagine the future of Chinatown through fantastical, futuristic, and limitless imagining of what the future could be. These narrative devices also allowed for the expression and exploration of individual and collective experiences of Chinatown as well as Chinatown’s relationship to Toronto. The stories they wrote look to the future to identify present questions and challenges that require our attention and exploration.

These VR spaces are architectural translations of the Chinatown imagined in the story. They are built from a point cloud collage, created by 3D-scanning existing places, buildings, objects and signs in Chinatown today, then remixing and reassembling them. These point cloud collages become a new, speculative Chinatown, a vision of a Chinatown that has never really existed, and yet, they still recognizably capture some essence of Chinatown. Each VR world tells the story of a particular writer’s relationship to place including its challenges, aspirations, fears, and hopes. Yet, in the space between these stories, we might also recognize a place for our own stories to emerge.

Finally, we have begun to explore how machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to reimagine the future of Chinatown. Emergent technologies, like AI, often find themselves first in marginalzied communities as a form of control and surveillance. To counter this, we wanted to explore how AI could be used for social dreaming. The following images are of a Chinatown that does not exist. It is all created by AI: imagining what old Chinatown might have been, imagining what Chinatown could be. This is not unlike the work for memory which attempts to reconstruct a whole picture out of the small fragments of memory that we are able to receive from our memory banks. In this space of remembering, of re-membering the past and present together again, we find moments which jump into a different future. And from these generative and speculative futures, we look for ways to bring change in to the present moment, towards a shared future for Chinatown.

IMAGES IN WORD DOC PROVIDED BY LINDA

[matt]

in layout