Futuristic art
New high-tech exhibition brings avant-garde works from Chinese and overseas artists to Beijing
After donning a special brain-monitoring headset, you will be able to see your real-time brain waves influence the electric sparks produced by a nearby static electricity generator – this is not some sci-fi film or an examination at the hospital, but a digital art installation from Chinese art group Pink Money on display at the Beijing Times Art Museum.
Showing off some of the coolest VR, AR and AI installation works from media artists from eight countries and regions, the Xcelerator exhibition, which debuted at the museum on Sunday, provides an immersive and futuristic experience for visitors.
For Chinese artist Zhang Weidi’s project Semiotics Studies v1.0, visitors put on VR headsets and used a motion tracking controller to fly around a virtual environment filled with fragments of Chinese characters, in a nearby room other visitors could see what the users were seeing projected on a wall-sized screen; on the other side of the room, visitors could be seen excitedly waving their arms in front of a 360-degree screen at French digital artist Vincent Houzé’s Fluid
Structure 360, where computerized fluid shapes could be influenced by people’s movements.
Art and tech
Inspired by the theory of the Big Bang, Xcelerator aims to explore the ties between art and technology, the exhibition’s co-curator Su Shaoyu said at the show’s opening ceremony on Sunday.
“One particle can be art, and another can be technology, and they go through the process of acceleration and when they collapse, the entropy [a physical concept measuring the degree of disorder in a system] grows – which means we have no way to predict what kind of relations they will have,” Su noted.
At the exhibition visitors have the chance to see not only new works from renowned international artists or refined versions of their older works, but also works from rising Chinese media artists, the co-curator noted.
“While many media artists today tend to show off fancy visuals using technology, I think we still need to inject more reflections about the society into our works,” Zhang, a 26-year-old Californiabased Chinese media artist, told the Global Times, noting that her Semiotics Studies v1.0 explores how language changes impact people.
Other works at the exhibition also seem to involve more social meaning rather than just simply bombarding people with fantastic effects.
With three moving robots and a bunch of mobile phones fixed at different heights and angles serving as cameras, US-based Chinese artist Luo Jieliang and his team’s Machinery Interference aims to uncover “the boundary between virtuality and reality and use machines to connect the virtual and the physical world.”
Visitors can take photos using the phones or robots, and these photos will appear in a collage on a nearby screen.
“People react when they see what the cameras see on the screen – it is a feedback system,” one of Luo’s team members explained.
“The artworks at the show will hopefully provide inspiration for future technology and the technology used in these artworks might also give us a chance to examine the impact they have on us,” the museum’s curator Zhao Yan told the Global Times.
Honoring the primitive
Some of the bigname artists in the field who attended the show, on the other hand, are trying to remind visitors of a time when technology was not quite so cutting edge.
Known for he and his team Rhizomatiks’s AR show at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics closing ceremony, Japanese artist Daito Manabe has brought his Deleted Reality, which, surprisingly, is about getting rid of all the modern technology that the artist has been so adept at using in many of his previous projects.
“We only use very primitive technologies like lasers [in Deleted Reality],” Manabe told the Global Times at the exhibition.
“VR, AR is now too popular, so I am trying do something that is related more to the fundamental stuff and try to make my art projects as primitive as possible,” said the Japanese artist, describing the colorful laser light show.
Gary Hill, a Seattle-based artist known as one of the “founding fathers” of video art, said his Accelerated Paintings series – a combination of three works featuring hidden cameras set at different angles that create distorted images of visitors who walk past – might also help people reflect upon the prevalence of surveillance networks. “In some way, they [Accelerated Paintings] refer to surveillance as a kind of virus,” Hill told the Global Times.