HK:丫:HK:丫:HK:丫:  vitamin space studio behind the star city hotel, guangzhou sunday 15:00, before catching another flight.  a conversation with 大明 turns out to be an exercise in grasping. As in holding on, we talked about it for so long, and in doing, he slapped at the computer and said “i hate this thing”, footage, a semantic exercise. It is not possible to ascertain whether one would have been more keen to remember naturally without it, as often suspected, but now all that is left are the remnants of feeling and machines. and oh yes the sparkle in his eyes.  [PUBLIC BUS – a butterfly moving back and forth between the driver and the passengers seated in the front seats for the elderly or handicapped]  one may have bored already with all that talk of archiving and documentation (“don’t say that! it’s something i’m interested in!”), but in the presence of the oversignaled conversation, or a small pale blue notebook with careful letters, “home for lost ideas”, it became interesting to juxtapose the falsely alluded stability of ARCHIVE with MOBILITY (the more cities we will meet in…)  [MOBILE TELEPHONE picks up – “I’m driving, I’ll call you later.”]  An illusion, yes—-the restaurateurs sweat, i pore over how to make more space on the hard drive—-for the reels will always start to decay, the paper yellows and becomes brittle or moist with mildew, the archived item, like memory, takes a half-life, conscious of what it once was, now less than. Temporal processes (cooking, growing, getting ready) bear a physicality. These, yes, are continuities. The act of documenting disPLACEs the documented object from its subject, in terms of the mediated action, reality from its image or copy, and its positioning within the consciousness of the documentary maker.  [TAXI – after a long silence, he asks, “do people pick their nose in Beijing?”]  If we are to keep the archive moving, imagine the scenario of various speeds traveling simultaneously side by side, the tour de france, the armoured truck. it was the memory that caught up with us, and that idea, it seems somehow fantastic, slips into the corner of your vision, up through to the tip of your tongue, already in momentum, such that, as the fear goes, if i were to stop, it would keep going, taking its own trajectory, its own lifehood. they were never yours or mine, and we are merely trying, you perhaps just a bit more gracefully, to keep up.  [recreation of SUBWAY – ]“today on subway, she and i were talking about how we want to print our ribbons, with print on one end of ribbon or both. and i said that to put it on both would be more balanced.” “for sausage?” “yes. and she said, ‘different ideas of balance…’ we see the world in such different ways. she felt that if the print were all on one side, then the fullness would balance with the emptiness on the other side. and i said that’s not balance, that’s contrast. but that contrast creates balance for her, like positive and negative.” “yes, but contrast results to balance in the middle, no?” “and you know there is no original word for ‘logic’ in chinese. and i thought this amazing.” “you told me. oh, many japanese people here.” “the word is from english. but maybe it’s more true. because to think of logic is a kind of objectivism, maybe, which i should not forget is all too deceiving. i envy her a lot.” “oh. why.” “what do you mean about balancing in the middle?” “i guess what you were saying about outweighing each other.” “what was i saying about outweighing? what do you mean? trying to understand. …would like to understand something today.” “full and empty, positive and negative are not balanced, not symmetrical but the outcome in the center is 0. not sure if that makes sense…” “that’s a kind of balance, too, no?” “yes, so maybe hers is a kind of balance, too.” “i mean, i see what you mean in the sense that it’s also a kind of annihilation. and this is perfectly her, yes. it is a kind of balance, and that was a nice to see.” “a balance of difference and a balance of sameness.”  no, grasping was not the point. and yet if not, if there were no continuity in these relations, no sense of fulfilling, then do processes become reduced to mere transaction? does the momentary require a sense of place any more or less than the sedentary? would it be important, to imagine for all these words passed between, a compiled identity of all the possible words of a certain past and an uncertain future? and if we were to do so, would i be really able to see the world as you do, and would i stop moving?