BEIJING

The 2020 American animated comedy The Croods: A New Age follows the cave family Croods as they discover an idyllic, walled-in paradise owned by the Bettermanns that meets all of their needs. The technologically advanced Bettermans, a family with a couple of steps above the Croods on the evolutionary ladder introduce the Croods to the concept of windows and a wooden frame that serves as a pre-historic iPad.

While standing in the living room of a flat on the second floor of the Sanlitun Diplomatic Apartment facing the Worker's Stadium North Road in Bejing the other morning i had to think about Thunk, the Croods‘ eldest son who gets obsessed by the concept of invisible screens spending his days and nights watching the world through a frame.

I was Thunk watching a man doing his morning routine of clapping his arms and chest to let the Chi flow while waiting for the bus. I was Thunk roaming the streets, the malls, the shops soaking in signals. Surprisingly it was not the unknownness of signs and symbols that confused me but the assemblage of supposedly well known carriers of cultural meaning.

We entered the shop. US-american Indie Rock from the noughties was blasting, you could buy Hoodies mimicking a Stanford University logo and basecaps with a Montauk lettering and so much more. The wooden floor, the harsh light, the warehouse feel. All there. It felt like shopping in the US, but at the same time it felt like shopping some where else. This could have actually been a moon base emulating a shopping experience with kids hanging out, checking out, going out. The looks, the glances, the communion, the isolation. It was all there right underneath the Fleetwood Mac mural right. A sudden sensation of dislocation got me. I was here. And here was hyperreal. It was difficult to near impossible to distinguish between the real reality and a representation of a supposed reality. What once was. Or never had been. Neither nor remained as information on screens, behind screens and beyond screens blurred.

There i was. Under the earth. Yet another mall. Clean and straight. There i was. Right next to a Subway fast food restaurant franchise with video displays endlessly and silently looping a video: A baguette bread being sliced. Shrimps circling around in slow motion – zero gravity shrimps out in space caught in an endless blackness just days after Shrimp Jesus - yet another iteration of garbage AI - had appeared.

Later we left the city. Passed the Sunrise Kempinski and ended up in a small village. It was dry, crisp and felt HD. The mountains and the endless blue. A drone, two vapor trails. Fading slowly. We are such stuff as dreams are made on.