dear Geert
I think we all met Ilya same time in Amsterdam... next five minutes 1996?
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/next-5-minutes-tactical-media-conference-amsterdam-rotterdam-january-18-21-1996?fbclid=IwAR2-vn_hs5tsLSwwxAh-z7HNa-5DPBLZmgFdn2EVUM4pA2NpqNPhcX8dwh0
sl
On 23.05.19 16:00, Geert Lovink wrote:
I also just heard that our dead activist-friend Ilya from Taiwan died
because of complications from cellulitis, a few days ago.
Thanks, Graham, you have described his warm character very well!
I can't trace the exact beginning of my friendship with Ilya but it
must have been in the last nineties. His trip to the third Next Five
Minutes tactical media festival in Amsterdam was a huge event for him
(and all of us). The idea of creating networks of artists and
activists working at the crossroads of politics, aesthetics and new
media was a very real, living thing.
In 2001, I did an email exchange with Ilya, for nettime:
https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-bold-0107/msg00508.html. In
my 2002 book Dark Fiber there is a travel report about my 1999 visit
to Taiwan and my work with Ilya. Since then I came to Taiwan and he to
Amsterdam on a number of occasions.
Ilya’s politics I found always very interesting: a unique mix of
radical practices, government policies (or the attempt to somehow
address them), research and IT startups. His passion and enthousiasm
to translate concepts from elsewhere to the high tech policy of the
‘renegade island’ that was going its own way, investigaring what
freedom on many level could mean, inspired all of us. Farewell, Ilya!
Geert
I wrote this for inclusion in a memorial volume, Ilya Li's memorial
is present in the living and breathing of networks he helped create
since 1996.
I'm not sure how many net timers knew of Ilya but until his sudden
death a few days ago - he had done so much great work from his base
in Taiwan. Here are a few words in his memory. If you have any words
or images you want add - a memorial page is on facebook that will be
printed of for his family. just search (Remember shih-chieh ilya li)
I'm not sure how ilya's idiosyncratic, strange, funny and generous
thought processes managed it, but he glued together a carnival of
like-minded misfits around the world, adding to their nutzo projects,
like YoHa's, 'Plastic Raft of Lampedusa'. Ilya gave many of us a
version of what globalisation, transnationalism could mean in
opposition to the fragmentary version we are fed with our processed
foods. He taught europeans like myself to listen before judgment, to
think with him around corners and on different scales while usually
eating delicious unprocessed food. He did this by guiding you to an
embarrassing pause, when you thought... I have no idea what he just
said to me or where it came from. At such moments, you had to ask
him, over the next tasty mouthful, to unravel his thoughts, translate
them across cultures so you could understand where you may have had
it wrong, to get a new insight.
Ilya was a romantic and I both saw him struggle with being on his own
and then it was my priviledge to see him seek out love, follow it
around the world and finally find it in his and his partner's garden,
growing more food for the future.
Ilya was our friend, eating companion, glue in a world that tries to
keep us separate.
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