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COVID-19,
           Bay Area, &
                flashing strobe light

3.9-3.16

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MON ------------------------------------ 3.9

I woke up at 5:30am in the morning to catch an early flight from Oaxaca to Mexico City, then from Mexico City to San Francisco. Before and inbetween the flights, I was checking the groupchat with the IPS organizing committee about the psychedelic summit my friends were going to organize this April.

In the early morning Kenneth received a message from Harvard that events with more than 100 people were highly likely to be canceled. 

Princeton also emailed students in the morning that it would move classes to online after spring break, and encouraged students to stay home for the rest of the semester. This is when I started to feel this was real in the US now.
 

Then after I landed in SF, Kenneth messaged that he got officially told by Harvard that we wouldn’t be able to do the summit in April. But at this point all of us were just excited that we could make the summit bigger and better in October. 

I checked in to my airbnb in Glen Park, and really loved the views on my walk out of the subway station. I also love that the bnb I got was on the Paradise Avenue. 

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TUE ------------------------------------ 3.10

In the evening I found out from my parents that I might not be able to renew my student visa in time to go back to Princeton this fall. Apparently, the earliest visa appointment in Beijing at that point was this November, which would certainly be too late.

So what do we do? I didn’t want to go back to China now. I thought of maybe going to the UK or Canada to get my student visa (you can’t apply for a US visa in the US), but that meant applying for a UK or Canada visa in the US first, which meant going to New York soon. 

Then I called my friend Elie, who told me about the two petitions students were signing at Princeton. One was a petition to reevaluate weight of midterms, and the other to consider a more lenient policy for international & low income students who would find remaining on campus a much safer and/or cheaper option than going home.

It also sounded like the campus was descending into some sort of intentional chaos, because many people were so sad about leaving campus so abruptly that they were congregating together in large groups to sing and party. I wish I could be physically there to witness such historical moments.

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WED ------------------------------------ 3.11

IPS committee had a meeting in the afternoon about its official response to coronavirus that would be sent out to speakers and attendees.

Some people were cautious about giving a definite future date given the currently unpredicatble situation. So we could only give out two tentative dates, and there wasn’t much else we could do at this point.

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THU ------------------------------------ 3.12

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FRI ------------------------------------ 3.13

This day was a real blur in my memory. I stayed home for the whole day, and time sort just passed by. 

I do remember calling Cameron for a while and freaking out about coronavirus together.  

Besides that, hmm, I don’t remember anything else.

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SAT ------------------------------------ 3.14

In the morning, I prepared my package for Diana, which included several things I bought in Mexico that I thought she would like: Oaxacan chocolate bars from a coffee shop I really loved, a belt with woven Zapotec patterns, two woven coasters, etc.

In the afternoon, I visited Quintin at his group house in Berkeley. Quintin is the qualia engineer at the Qualia Research Institute. I asked him to talk about his work at QRI for the documentary I’m making. On and out of the camera, several people/topics that came up in our conversation got me very intrigued: David Pearce, paradise engineering, how bitcoins made a bunch of random weird people super rich, etc. 

At the start of this month, several circumstances/events/reflections led me to decide to major in history of science, with a certificate in architecture and engineering, instead of pursuing any degree or certificate in art, which almost had always been part of my imagination. 

To summarize what happened, I felt like I was already getting a lot of art education during this gap year, either through courses I found or learning on my own (practice, youtube videos, closely observing good works, etc). It all of a sudden seemed like a waste of time to pursue an art degree, especially given that it is much harder to get a Princeton-level education in academic topics, than getting a good quality art education somewhere in the world.

The History of Contemporary Science course I took freshman fall was one of the two courses from my first year of college, that actually changed the way I saw the wolrd. And I have always loved learning from my friends who usually are STEM majors. Every course in Princeton’s HoS course list sounds so fascinating to me. I feel like I’d really love to pursue HoS as my academic major, with the intention of being an artist post graduation. 

So while talking to Quintin -- the first actual friend I met physically in two months -- I felt an explotion of inspirations within my mind about how what he was interested in and planned to do could inform my artistic practice. 




This is a consistent theme in my visits to Sonia and Andres in the next two days as well: the combination of a grounded excitement about the future and a curiosity towards utopian-minded engineers. 

What if I make a docu series about paradise engineering, with each episode portraying a different group of people, or topic?

What if I make a documentary about what happens after some of the people who suddenly got rich through bit coin and how they found different weird ways to spend the money?

What if I make some piece of art about David Pearce, showing, especially, how he is so smart that he feels deeply (and thus suffers deeply) for beings far beyond humans alone? 



I enjoyed having these thoughts because they help me think for myself with a bigger picture in mind. What I am doing at the moment is a small piece to the bigger path I want to lay for myself. And this thought makes me peaceful.

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SUN ------------------------------------ 3.15

The only thing I did on this day was interviewing Sonia, who started the first psychedelic club in the Ivy League colleges after the 60s. 

We mainly went to the two group houses she had been staying in the past few months. And I just put up the camera and let her talk about everything she wanted to talk about that was relevant to the documentary.

One moment I loved was when I got to her room in the first group house, only to hear her calling me from outside the window and asking me if I wanted to film on the roof.

Of course I said yes. I carefully packed all my equipment into my backpack, and climbed up the completely vertical ladder with $5000+ worth of stuff on my back... 

On the roof, Sonia talked about her internal changes after graduating college last year. 

The second group house Sonia brought me to had a lot of curious objects/decorations throughout the space, including a guest room/pod with an immersive light show inside. That got me super excited about living in a group house after college... It felt like the perfect kind of living condition to me: really smart and cool housemates, beautifully & uniquely decorated spaces, and proximity to intellectual spaces.

That house was a playground!



While I was there, I asked Sonia to elaborate more on the process of starting Eleusis -- Princeton’s first psychedelic club -- in 2017. She showed me her club application, the document she put together for the club that was basically a syllabus, the Daily Princetonian article featuring the club, etc. 

It felt very cool to join her down the memory lane and imagine the space and time I did not experience, but as if I was actually there.






I also really loved the conversations we had on the road, when we weren’t filming with a purpose. 

At some point we started talking about celebrities and archetypes. Like how Sonia found strength in seeing Ariana Grande’s success and power while being physically tiny. Like how I found mine through Billie Eilish. Especially how I found myself actually enjoying being thought of as gay or bisexual because of the way I look or behave. Before learning about Billie Eilish, I was mildly frustrated by giving off the wrong sense that I am gay/bisexual because of something about me that I can’t quite point to (my hair color? how I don’t really dress in very feminine way that contours my body shape? something about how I behave??).

But then when I was told that a new friend thought I was gay in December because I didn’t behave in ways the society expects girls to, I noticed that my immediate reaction to that comment was a positive one. I thought that made me feel quite cool about myself. This change in my reaction to similar comments definitely had a lot to do with Billie Eilish.

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MON ------------------------------------ 3.16

Just like the previous two days visiting Sonia and Quintin, filming Andres was an absolutely delightful and inspiring experience.

I decided to do something quite different with this shoot. Instead of asking Andres straight up to answer my questions in front of the camera, I asked him to first do whatever he’d normally do if I wasn’t there. I told him to just don’t care about my presence for a while, so Andres started reading his book, drawing graphs, coding, etc. Meanwhile I just explored around the room with my camera, sometimes directing the lens to Andres, othertimes to his essential oil collection, or wall decorations, or anything else that caught my eyes. 

After at least half an hour, I broke the silence by asking Andres about what he was doing, and sort of lead him to talk about the various projects he had been working on to me (while showing me relevant objects, graphs, etc), like a normal conversation, but in front of the camera. It felt a lot more natural this way.

And *then* we did a more formal interview in which I first asked him to do a monologue about what he does and how he got here. Then I let my curiosity take over and asked him questions inspired by what he said.

I thought everything flowed quite nicely, and I was quite happy with my little experimentation with documentation & interview procedures this time.




From the very start of the documentary process, I noticed how much subtle interactions could change the naturalness of people’s presentation in front of the camera. When I did my very first shoot with Jonathan, it made a huge difference in how naturally Jonathan narrated his story when I asked him to look at me and I nodded while listening to his narration, versus when he looked at the camera lens. 

It has been a rather slow process for me to figure out how I want to conduct interviews/shoots for the documentary. But I can also see that this is something to be learned through many years of experimentation and experience. So I am not putting too much pressure on myself in this regard.

I am just enjoying learning about how to make people feel at ease, heard, and at their most comfortable place internally while being potentially vulnerable in front of the camera. So that I can do my best in replicating the magic I experience in my life through my film.

That night, I packed my bags and got on the plane to Philadelphia.