The eternal truths of art are on show
By Zhang Kun (China Daily)
10:13, June 09, 2013Sparrow is a video project of seven minutes, taken from Johnnie To's feature movie of the same title. Provided to China Daily
A large-scale new media art exhibition is taking place in downtown Shanghai's K11 Art Mall. Titled Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Money: Art after Social Media Era, the exhibition features 26 projects from 28 artists, half of which were commissioned especially for the show.
Participants are not only established artists such as China's Yang Fudong and Hu Jieming, big-budget commercial movie director Johnnie To, but also include Japan's Ryoji Ikeda and Belgium's Marnix de Nijs.
Yang, a Shanghai-based contemporary visual artist, has created projects that resemble feature movies.
"The definition of 'new media art' has kept expanding as technology has developed, and now the boundaries are very blurred," says Li Zhenhua, curator of the show, who has been active in the international art scene since 2008.
According to Li, Chinese artists have always explored new possibilities and new media.
"It's all about creativity," Li says. He has borrowed the exhibition name from Michael Naimark, an American researcher invited by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2010, to do laboratory experiments on art and media.
According to the research, truth, beauty, freedom and money are the most high profile elements in art. Li believes that although many things have changed in the social media era, the core of art remains the same.
Li believes that in the era of social media, everyone can participate in art or interact with it. It can happen in the museum, in virtual space, in the elevator or the bus, even with "the data in electric circuits", he says.
Belgian artist Marnix de Nijs presents a robot with feelings, for the exhibition. It is an interactive installation composed of a revolving mechanic arm with digital censors on the tip.
It feels the approach of the audience, follows their movements and makes sounds like a toy dog would do.
But when people come too close, or there are too many people around, it "freaks out" and revolves rapidly at up to 100 kph, while making sharp noise, 100 decibels loud. A "sensitive creature", as Li describes it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media_art
New media art is a genre that encompasses artworks created with
new media technologies, including
digital art,
computer graphics,
computer animation,
virtual art,
Internet art,
interactive art,
video games,
computer robotics, and art as
biotechnology.
The term differentiates itself by its resulting cultural objects and
social events, which can be seen in opposition to those deriving from
old visual arts (i.e. traditional
painting, sculpture, etc.). This concern with medium is a key feature of much
contemporary art and indeed many art schools and major Universities now offer majors in "New Genres" or "New Media"
[1] and a growing number of graduate programs have emerged internationally.
[2]
New Media Art often involves interaction between artist and observer or
between observers and the artwork, which responds to them. Yet, as
several theorists and curators have noted, such forms of interaction,
social exchange, participation, and transformation do not distinguish
new media art but rather serve as a common ground that has parallels in
other strands of contemporary art practice.
[3]
Such insights emphasize the forms of cultural practice that arise
concurrently with emerging technological platforms, and question the
focus on technological media, per se.
New Media concerns are often derived from the
telecommunications,
mass media and
digital modes of delivery the artworks involve, with practices ranging from
conceptual to
virtual art,
performance to
installation.
Themes
Maurizio Bolognini's programmed machines (
Computer sigillati series, 1992): hundreds of computers have been producing endless flows of random images.
[7]
In the book
New Media Art,
Mark Tribe and Reena Jana named several themes that contemporary new media art addresses, including
computer art,
collaboration,
identity,
appropriation,
open sourcing,
telepresence, surveillance, corporate parody, as well as intervention and
hacktivism.
[8] In the book
Postdigitale,
[9] Maurizio Bolognini
suggested that new media artists have one common denominator, which is a
self-referential relationship with the new technologies, the result of
finding oneself inside an epoch-making transformation determined by
technological development. Nevertheless new media art does not appear as
a set of homogeneous practices, but as a complex field converging
around three main elements: 1) the art system, 2) scientific and
industrial research, and 3) political-cultural media activism. There are
significant differences between scientist-artists, activist-artists and
technological artists closer to the art system, who not only do have
different training and technocultures, but have different artistic
production.
[10] This should be taken into account in examining the several themes addressed by new media art.
Non-linearity can be seen as an important topic to new media art by artists like
Bill Viola
who explores the term as an approach to looking at varying forms of
digital projects. This is a key concept since people acquired the notion
that they were conditioned to view everything in a linear and clear-cut
fashion. Now, art is stepping out of that form and allowing for people
to build their own experiences with the piece. People always ask, "What
is the difference between non-linearity and randomness?" Non-linearity
describes a project that has freedom with certain parameters, whereas
randomness has freedom and no boundaries whatsoever. Non-linear art
usually requires audience participation to reveal its non-linearity
while random art, more-or-less, acts on its own. In doing so, viewers
can understand another theme in the many forms of new media art. The
participatory aspect of new media art, which for some artists has become
integral, emerged from
Allan Kaprow's
Happenings.
The inter-connectivity and interactivity of the
internet,
as well as the fight between corporate interests, governmental
interests, and public interests that gave birth to the web today,
fascinate and inspire a lot of current new media art.
Many new media art projects also work with themes like politics and social consciousness, allowing for
social activism through the interactive nature of the media.
One of the key themes in new media art is to create visual views of databases. Pioneers in this area include
Lisa Strausfeld and
Martin Wattenberg.
[11]
Database aesthetics holds at least two attractions to new media
artists: formally, as a new variation on non-linear narratives; and
politically as a means to subvert what is fast becoming a form of
control and authority.
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