Media Art in Beijing and Its Links to Austrian Media Art
something has happened since 1989
Media Art in Beijing and Its Links to Austrian Media Art
Li Zhenhua
Historical View
Beijing’s situation is probably the most complex and diverse, for it takes on a special model function as a result of politics and economics. It used to be said, “Beijing will no longer be Beijing without the Hutongs. Today’s skyscrapers could be from any city in the world.”
Media art began to develop as an important trend in contemporary art all across China after the 1996 exhibition organized by Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun, Appearance and Reflection: Chinese Video Art. In 2000, departments for media art were opened one after the other at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Chinese Academy for Fine Art, and the Tsinghua University’s Academy of Art and Design and increasing numbers of young people took up studies in programs that moved towards combining technology and the fine arts. The 2002 Multimedia Art Festival Asia Pacific (MAAP) in Beijing brought the newest developments in international media art for the first time to Chinese artists and the Chinese audience: the work Way of Life by Jeffrey Shaw (ZKM) in particular presented for the importance of the latest interactive technologies for media art. In addition, numerous other works were exhibited that combined all sorts of methods enabled by the new media with art and philosophy. It thus became possible for audience and artists alike to begin to accept media art; this led in 2004 to the International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium, a collaboration between Tsinghua University and the China Millennium Museum.
When it comes to regional developments in contemporary art, in Beijing there is now a growing trend towards the conglomeration of private art spaces, artist studios, and gallery spaces. After a genuine artist’s district emerged in 2001 in Fei Jia Cun (outside Beijing), Jie Zi Yuan, beginning in 2003 a new hot spot started to emerge at 798 Factory in Dashanzi that concentrated developments in the local art world much more systematically. While in 2004 in artist district Cao Chang Di emerged around the China Art Archives & Warehouse, in 2004 Song Zhuang Art Museum made some important first steps in concentrating the art scene in Tongzhour. This kind of concentration should not be overlooked in developments of contemporary art in Beijing. After the artist village in Yuanwing Yuan (Summer Palace) was dissolved in 1994, artist districts have been established in the suburbs and area around Beijing, like Tongzhou in the east and the 798 Factory, Cao Chang Di, Hua Jia Di und Jiu Chang to the north. With the introduction of the notion of “creative industry,” in Beijing a great deal of private capital and forces came together. In 2006 a new center for creative industry was established to mark the start of a new era where state and non-state elements collaborate, come together, and announce the beginning of Chinese media art.
The Beginnings of New Chinese Media Art
To date there has not been any shared presentation of Chinese media art, with the exception of the first Digital Art Festival, organized in 2001 by Qiu Zhijie, Wu Meichun, and Li Zhenhua and held in Loft Art Space. As an independent discipline, media art still lacks autonomy and everydayness. The 2005 exhibition With a Loud Voice, curated by Ou Ning/Ji Ji Jiang Jian, brought from the viewpoint of the designers fresh air and a new look at contemporary art, exerted a direct influence on setting the theme of the 2006 Shanghai Biennial, More Than Design. The dynamism in the expansion of the content and the direction of media art in contrast to contemporary Chinese art is slowly becoming clearer.
The Beginnings of Beijing Cubic Art Center, 798 Factory, 2004
When I met Yao Bin for the first time in Japan, he was still a contemporary Chinese artist living in Japan. During my Tokyo exhibition Before the Window, we got to know each other better, and I told him about the situation of contemporary art in China. Yao Bin showed a great interest in the current situation of contemporary Chinese art, not least because my exhibition focused on media art. We developed a plan for an exhibition of his works that was to be shown simultaneously in Beijing and Tokyo. Just before the end of 2004, we saw each other once again in a studio in the 798 Factory, where his works were being shown. He wanted find a place of his own to create new media art. Since Spring 2005, Yao Bin has had such a space, the first one in 798 Factory to concentrate on media art. Teaching on media art since 2000 provided a glimpse of the exchange of international media art on a high level. Yao Bin’s space signalized a deeper engagement in the exchange of media art, and numerous interactive media projects slowly became public. The establishment of such a space was accompanied by some concrete problems, for example the financing and choice of projects. To solve such problems, Yao Bin made genuine compromises, developing flexible methods, and in so doing accepted some projects that did not fit into his development concept. But even under such difficult circumstances, Yao Bin’s Beijing Cubic Art Center does not fit the overall trend towards commercialization. In several special projects, the Beijing Cubic Art Center laid the foundation for the existing diversity of contemporary art and its representation, thus creating at the same time the basis for the development of Chinese media artist.
Notable projects carried out in 2005–2006 at Beijing Cubic Art Center include:
Moon: Electric Language
This exhibition included various components: an interactive installation controlled by an Internet linkup, and a mechanical installation operated by exhibition visitors. Among the interactive components, in Yao Bin’s work Your Air an oxygen device in an acquarium on site is controlled with the help of visitors using an Internet connection. The entire installation was concerned with the interaction of man and machine. In addition, in the work of Max Kazemzaheh, an American artist, the relationships between various mechanical installations is shown. In his work, the reactions of the participants generated various voices: in this way, a work of media art was created where visual sensation is translated into sound.
City Sounds
The sound project initiated by British Council also chose Beijing Cubic Art Center as the place to carry out the sound recordings and performances of the British artists Peter Cusak and David Toop. The experimentation with sound formats and the playful exchange as well as the performances as well as the projects simultaneously carried out elsewhere by the two artists Brian Eno and Clive Bell opened new possibilities for interaction between music and art in Beijing. In this project, sound stood at the center of experimentation, at the same time it was also an important bearer of information for social culture.
Zhang Ga
Portrait: Global Net Art Engineering
Zhang Ga’s work stretched over five different countries and cities, with Beijing Cubic Art Center as a performance site. Each day many people took part in the project, for the work was transmitted to public sites in five different countries, and in this way the portraits became transmitters of information in various sites and spaces. This work is interesting in two senses—on the one hand, due to the interaction between private and pubic space, and at the same time due to its transregional visual character. Multicultural backgrounds are dispersed using visual editing techniques, making the visual transmission more interesting. In self-expression by way of reflection of feelings and action as well as the space behind, images were fed from various spaces and sites into the net and then again dispersed to new sites, thus creating interactivity. In this way, the technological possibilities of future cultural forms of communication like web cam culture and web blogging are alluded to.
n o w h e r e: ein Welt Raum Spiel
An Austrian Media Art Project at Beijing Cubic Art Center
The title of this work can be read as “Now Here” or “Nowhere,” two terms referring to geographic coordinates. The innovative aspect of this project has to do with the use of media by the artists. Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler’s ideas circle around the playful aspect of the media; they underscore constantly the playful element, and the importance of combining acts/scenes/transitions in their work. Sylvia Eckermann is responsible for Konzept und Game Art, Gerald Nestler for concept and research, Oliver Irschitz for interface, and Christof Cargnelli for Sound-Komposition
The work N o w h e r e is based on the Gläserne Kette (Glass Chain), a group of artists and architects founded by Bruno Taut in 1919/1920 with utopian modernism as its goal. In an the letters and sketches shared amongst them, the group created a utopian social and architectural model. Nonetheless, the architectural models explored in the letters also treated concrete architectural developments.
But many of these texts never appeared in Germany. The exchange of the Gläserne Kette reflected the crisis in German architectural theory after the First World War. In the instable atmosphere caused by the wounds of war, architects refused materialism and positivism. Their goal was to build up a utopian aesthetic on a unified and comprehensive foundation. After years of intense theoretic considerations, the Gläserne Kette began to take on concrete form, and encompassed Bruno and Max Taut, Walter Gropius, Hans and Wassili Luckhardt, Hermann Finsterlin, Wenzel August Hablik as well as Hans Scharoun, who all supported new German architecture and brought it to realization.
The project n o w h e r e – ein Welt Raum Spiel is outstanding in both a technological and artistic sense. It occupies a three-dimensional space where the player navigates through the work without the aid of the devices often needed in the virtual environment, like a mouse, keyboard, are required. The project also has disposed of the camera or gloves often needed for virtual realities. It is thus much easier for the beholder to submerge himself in the virtual reality of the project, for he or she simply needs to move his hands in space: this movement then controls the content. Since this project is based on a first-person-shooter computer game, the imaginative space is comprised of a virtual space in which all information llinked to the Gläserne Kette emerge due to the 3D motions of the beholder, who floats like an electronic figure through this world of information and data that has its origins in modern architecture. A large part of the information used in the letters—the texts, images, poems, and models—are transformed into virtual reality. All the facts from architecture, philosophy, sociology, and art that the Gläserne Kette explored formed the starting point of this work by Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler, Oliver Irschitz, and Christof Cargnelli. The technology is thus used to present the ideas of this group, but at the same time this is accompanied by the playful actions of the beholder and developed further, along with the original texts presented in English. Knowledge is in this work is passed on through the senses of feeling, hearing, and touch.
It is interesting to compare n o w h e r e and Web of Life by Jeffrey Shaw, n o w h e r e emphasizes a holistic sensation, beginning with a method based in the senses of sight, hearing, and touch, multimedia, and the diversity, as well as the idea of working with historical information and combining these with contemporary artistic possibilities, that stretch to the education and scientific experiment; while Jeffrey Shaw’s work is characterized by a kind of multi-surface visual information, that explores the palm lines of the user and compares them, and in media art makes use of experimentation to decode for the beholder visual information altered scientifically. Unmistakably n o w h e r e processes various virtual ideas, while Web of Life represents a multi-media application, explores natural scientific explorations, but both have in common the real engagement with the new media. No matter whether the virtual space of n o w h e r e or the cave-like environment of Web of Life, media art installations require a fixed space where there can be an interaction between man and machine, or put differently, a place in which this reality can be alluded to by way of secret spaces that ultimately trigger the sensibility of human sensation.
Diverse World and Diverse Future
Bruno Taut’s Glaspalast (Glass Palace), presented at the 1914 Werkbundaustellung in Cologne, was constructed of iridescent glass panels. Taut was inspired by the work of Paul Scheerbart—not an architect, but a writer. Inspired by him Taut created an iridescent and multi-layered architecture by using modern construction materials. On the surfaces of this glass palace, sentences by Scheerbart were engraved: for example, “colored glass extinguishes hate” (Farbiges Glas löscht den Hass). The new construction materials and techniques met the demands of Bruno Taut’s unusual thinking; his designs would continue to spark debate in years to come, for it was one of the paradigmatic examples of architectural expressionism. It is said the Bruno Taut with his utopian concepts realized the dream of all architects to change the world, and thus the world of human thought.
I don’t think that the true meaning of media art can only be transported by way of art. There is also the renewal of media art transmitted by way of technology. This technology has, as the development of mechanics did in its time, brought with it an new aesthetic taste, for technology surely creates a different standard. Here, media art is concerned with the restoration and return from natural and philosophical aspects and their aesthetic limits. The knowledge and control of technology b y the artist solves many problems that emerge in search of a new aesthetic, and the beauty of technology artificially created by man still awaits discovery. The themes that now surface in media art are inseparable from us, and can be interpreted as Darwinist questions of survival. As far as the AI robot’s virtual reality/ biology is concerned, the personified development to the ultimate AI that combines the digitalized and mechanical development in one will probably take quite a bit of time. The social reality created by an interactive engagement between man and virtual reality is clearly not so far off. And biology will also open up possibilities to decode our self in the microcosm: this self composed of the recognizable physical and chemical components of our body, but also includes the hidden secrets of the soul.
Regardless whether in China or Austria, we all see ourselves confronted with the possibilities of media art applications. Media art quite clearly offers for future information transmission multiple human possibilities and can also give us a sense of many perspectives from the future. From an artistic point of view, the technological support is still lacking, the artists often lack technological abilities and a deeper awareness. But these questions deal in just the same way with the same questions with which international media art has already been confronted for decades. What is needed is a development that is directed at smaller groups: it is also necessary that persons with the most various backgrounds take part in getting to know the many possibilities that the future will bring us.
Media Art in Beijing and Its Links to Austrian Media Art
Li Zhenhua
Historical View
Beijing’s situation is probably the most complex and diverse, for it takes on a special model function as a result of politics and economics. It used to be said, “Beijing will no longer be Beijing without the Hutongs. Today’s skyscrapers could be from any city in the world.”
Media art began to develop as an important trend in contemporary art all across China after the 1996 exhibition organized by Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun, Appearance and Reflection: Chinese Video Art. In 2000, departments for media art were opened one after the other at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Chinese Academy for Fine Art, and the Tsinghua University’s Academy of Art and Design and increasing numbers of young people took up studies in programs that moved towards combining technology and the fine arts. The 2002 Multimedia Art Festival Asia Pacific (MAAP) in Beijing brought the newest developments in international media art for the first time to Chinese artists and the Chinese audience: the work Way of Life by Jeffrey Shaw (ZKM) in particular presented for the importance of the latest interactive technologies for media art. In addition, numerous other works were exhibited that combined all sorts of methods enabled by the new media with art and philosophy. It thus became possible for audience and artists alike to begin to accept media art; this led in 2004 to the International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium, a collaboration between Tsinghua University and the China Millennium Museum.
When it comes to regional developments in contemporary art, in Beijing there is now a growing trend towards the conglomeration of private art spaces, artist studios, and gallery spaces. After a genuine artist’s district emerged in 2001 in Fei Jia Cun (outside Beijing), Jie Zi Yuan, beginning in 2003 a new hot spot started to emerge at 798 Factory in Dashanzi that concentrated developments in the local art world much more systematically. While in 2004 in artist district Cao Chang Di emerged around the China Art Archives & Warehouse, in 2004 Song Zhuang Art Museum made some important first steps in concentrating the art scene in Tongzhour. This kind of concentration should not be overlooked in developments of contemporary art in Beijing. After the artist village in Yuanwing Yuan (Summer Palace) was dissolved in 1994, artist districts have been established in the suburbs and area around Beijing, like Tongzhou in the east and the 798 Factory, Cao Chang Di, Hua Jia Di und Jiu Chang to the north. With the introduction of the notion of “creative industry,” in Beijing a great deal of private capital and forces came together. In 2006 a new center for creative industry was established to mark the start of a new era where state and non-state elements collaborate, come together, and announce the beginning of Chinese media art.
The Beginnings of New Chinese Media Art
To date there has not been any shared presentation of Chinese media art, with the exception of the first Digital Art Festival, organized in 2001 by Qiu Zhijie, Wu Meichun, and Li Zhenhua and held in Loft Art Space. As an independent discipline, media art still lacks autonomy and everydayness. The 2005 exhibition With a Loud Voice, curated by Ou Ning/Ji Ji Jiang Jian, brought from the viewpoint of the designers fresh air and a new look at contemporary art, exerted a direct influence on setting the theme of the 2006 Shanghai Biennial, More Than Design. The dynamism in the expansion of the content and the direction of media art in contrast to contemporary Chinese art is slowly becoming clearer.
The Beginnings of Beijing Cubic Art Center, 798 Factory, 2004
When I met Yao Bin for the first time in Japan, he was still a contemporary Chinese artist living in Japan. During my Tokyo exhibition Before the Window, we got to know each other better, and I told him about the situation of contemporary art in China. Yao Bin showed a great interest in the current situation of contemporary Chinese art, not least because my exhibition focused on media art. We developed a plan for an exhibition of his works that was to be shown simultaneously in Beijing and Tokyo. Just before the end of 2004, we saw each other once again in a studio in the 798 Factory, where his works were being shown. He wanted find a place of his own to create new media art. Since Spring 2005, Yao Bin has had such a space, the first one in 798 Factory to concentrate on media art. Teaching on media art since 2000 provided a glimpse of the exchange of international media art on a high level. Yao Bin’s space signalized a deeper engagement in the exchange of media art, and numerous interactive media projects slowly became public. The establishment of such a space was accompanied by some concrete problems, for example the financing and choice of projects. To solve such problems, Yao Bin made genuine compromises, developing flexible methods, and in so doing accepted some projects that did not fit into his development concept. But even under such difficult circumstances, Yao Bin’s Beijing Cubic Art Center does not fit the overall trend towards commercialization. In several special projects, the Beijing Cubic Art Center laid the foundation for the existing diversity of contemporary art and its representation, thus creating at the same time the basis for the development of Chinese media artist.
Notable projects carried out in 2005–2006 at Beijing Cubic Art Center include:
Moon: Electric Language
This exhibition included various components: an interactive installation controlled by an Internet linkup, and a mechanical installation operated by exhibition visitors. Among the interactive components, in Yao Bin’s work Your Air an oxygen device in an acquarium on site is controlled with the help of visitors using an Internet connection. The entire installation was concerned with the interaction of man and machine. In addition, in the work of Max Kazemzaheh, an American artist, the relationships between various mechanical installations is shown. In his work, the reactions of the participants generated various voices: in this way, a work of media art was created where visual sensation is translated into sound.
City Sounds
The sound project initiated by British Council also chose Beijing Cubic Art Center as the place to carry out the sound recordings and performances of the British artists Peter Cusak and David Toop. The experimentation with sound formats and the playful exchange as well as the performances as well as the projects simultaneously carried out elsewhere by the two artists Brian Eno and Clive Bell opened new possibilities for interaction between music and art in Beijing. In this project, sound stood at the center of experimentation, at the same time it was also an important bearer of information for social culture.
Zhang Ga
Portrait: Global Net Art Engineering
Zhang Ga’s work stretched over five different countries and cities, with Beijing Cubic Art Center as a performance site. Each day many people took part in the project, for the work was transmitted to public sites in five different countries, and in this way the portraits became transmitters of information in various sites and spaces. This work is interesting in two senses—on the one hand, due to the interaction between private and pubic space, and at the same time due to its transregional visual character. Multicultural backgrounds are dispersed using visual editing techniques, making the visual transmission more interesting. In self-expression by way of reflection of feelings and action as well as the space behind, images were fed from various spaces and sites into the net and then again dispersed to new sites, thus creating interactivity. In this way, the technological possibilities of future cultural forms of communication like web cam culture and web blogging are alluded to.
n o w h e r e: ein Welt Raum Spiel
An Austrian Media Art Project at Beijing Cubic Art Center
The title of this work can be read as “Now Here” or “Nowhere,” two terms referring to geographic coordinates. The innovative aspect of this project has to do with the use of media by the artists. Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler’s ideas circle around the playful aspect of the media; they underscore constantly the playful element, and the importance of combining acts/scenes/transitions in their work. Sylvia Eckermann is responsible for Konzept und Game Art, Gerald Nestler for concept and research, Oliver Irschitz for interface, and Christof Cargnelli for Sound-Komposition
The work N o w h e r e is based on the Gläserne Kette (Glass Chain), a group of artists and architects founded by Bruno Taut in 1919/1920 with utopian modernism as its goal. In an the letters and sketches shared amongst them, the group created a utopian social and architectural model. Nonetheless, the architectural models explored in the letters also treated concrete architectural developments.
But many of these texts never appeared in Germany. The exchange of the Gläserne Kette reflected the crisis in German architectural theory after the First World War. In the instable atmosphere caused by the wounds of war, architects refused materialism and positivism. Their goal was to build up a utopian aesthetic on a unified and comprehensive foundation. After years of intense theoretic considerations, the Gläserne Kette began to take on concrete form, and encompassed Bruno and Max Taut, Walter Gropius, Hans and Wassili Luckhardt, Hermann Finsterlin, Wenzel August Hablik as well as Hans Scharoun, who all supported new German architecture and brought it to realization.
The project n o w h e r e – ein Welt Raum Spiel is outstanding in both a technological and artistic sense. It occupies a three-dimensional space where the player navigates through the work without the aid of the devices often needed in the virtual environment, like a mouse, keyboard, are required. The project also has disposed of the camera or gloves often needed for virtual realities. It is thus much easier for the beholder to submerge himself in the virtual reality of the project, for he or she simply needs to move his hands in space: this movement then controls the content. Since this project is based on a first-person-shooter computer game, the imaginative space is comprised of a virtual space in which all information llinked to the Gläserne Kette emerge due to the 3D motions of the beholder, who floats like an electronic figure through this world of information and data that has its origins in modern architecture. A large part of the information used in the letters—the texts, images, poems, and models—are transformed into virtual reality. All the facts from architecture, philosophy, sociology, and art that the Gläserne Kette explored formed the starting point of this work by Sylvia Eckermann, Gerald Nestler, Oliver Irschitz, and Christof Cargnelli. The technology is thus used to present the ideas of this group, but at the same time this is accompanied by the playful actions of the beholder and developed further, along with the original texts presented in English. Knowledge is in this work is passed on through the senses of feeling, hearing, and touch.
It is interesting to compare n o w h e r e and Web of Life by Jeffrey Shaw, n o w h e r e emphasizes a holistic sensation, beginning with a method based in the senses of sight, hearing, and touch, multimedia, and the diversity, as well as the idea of working with historical information and combining these with contemporary artistic possibilities, that stretch to the education and scientific experiment; while Jeffrey Shaw’s work is characterized by a kind of multi-surface visual information, that explores the palm lines of the user and compares them, and in media art makes use of experimentation to decode for the beholder visual information altered scientifically. Unmistakably n o w h e r e processes various virtual ideas, while Web of Life represents a multi-media application, explores natural scientific explorations, but both have in common the real engagement with the new media. No matter whether the virtual space of n o w h e r e or the cave-like environment of Web of Life, media art installations require a fixed space where there can be an interaction between man and machine, or put differently, a place in which this reality can be alluded to by way of secret spaces that ultimately trigger the sensibility of human sensation.
Diverse World and Diverse Future
Bruno Taut’s Glaspalast (Glass Palace), presented at the 1914 Werkbundaustellung in Cologne, was constructed of iridescent glass panels. Taut was inspired by the work of Paul Scheerbart—not an architect, but a writer. Inspired by him Taut created an iridescent and multi-layered architecture by using modern construction materials. On the surfaces of this glass palace, sentences by Scheerbart were engraved: for example, “colored glass extinguishes hate” (Farbiges Glas löscht den Hass). The new construction materials and techniques met the demands of Bruno Taut’s unusual thinking; his designs would continue to spark debate in years to come, for it was one of the paradigmatic examples of architectural expressionism. It is said the Bruno Taut with his utopian concepts realized the dream of all architects to change the world, and thus the world of human thought.
I don’t think that the true meaning of media art can only be transported by way of art. There is also the renewal of media art transmitted by way of technology. This technology has, as the development of mechanics did in its time, brought with it an new aesthetic taste, for technology surely creates a different standard. Here, media art is concerned with the restoration and return from natural and philosophical aspects and their aesthetic limits. The knowledge and control of technology b y the artist solves many problems that emerge in search of a new aesthetic, and the beauty of technology artificially created by man still awaits discovery. The themes that now surface in media art are inseparable from us, and can be interpreted as Darwinist questions of survival. As far as the AI robot’s virtual reality/ biology is concerned, the personified development to the ultimate AI that combines the digitalized and mechanical development in one will probably take quite a bit of time. The social reality created by an interactive engagement between man and virtual reality is clearly not so far off. And biology will also open up possibilities to decode our self in the microcosm: this self composed of the recognizable physical and chemical components of our body, but also includes the hidden secrets of the soul.
Regardless whether in China or Austria, we all see ourselves confronted with the possibilities of media art applications. Media art quite clearly offers for future information transmission multiple human possibilities and can also give us a sense of many perspectives from the future. From an artistic point of view, the technological support is still lacking, the artists often lack technological abilities and a deeper awareness. But these questions deal in just the same way with the same questions with which international media art has already been confronted for decades. What is needed is a development that is directed at smaller groups: it is also necessary that persons with the most various backgrounds take part in getting to know the many possibilities that the future will bring us.
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