BMAB+B3: “Ethics of Technology” in Retrospect

2016-10-27 BMAB BMAB

BMAB+B3: promotional video of“Ethics of Technology”

music:Hong Qile

photo credit : Kin Lo

Hosted by Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing Design Week and B3 Moving Image Biennial, the Thematic Exhibition of Beijing Media Art Biennale ended on the 9th of October. Under the guiding theme “Ethics of Technology”, the Biennale acts in an interdisciplinary way and transcends genres, offering an international platform for the discourse and networking of artists, scholars technologists, practitioners across all fields to discuss the re-articulation and re-configuration of the ethical orders and the distribution of technology’s sensibility.

Haven’t yet had a chance to visit BMAB? The“Lab Space” Special Exhibition held in CAFA museum will continue until the 30th of October. It includes artworks of Gary Hill and selected works from B3 Moving Image Biennial. Now let’s have a look at some photos taken at the exhibition.

The Great BMAB Wall

Centered on the 5 topics, studies of subjects such as cyborg, genetic modification, data privacy, etc., were arranged and presented in a logical and readable way on the wall, which also correspond to the participating artists that work on related topics, forming a strong dialogue between arts and technology.

AI Curator

Notice a wooden box on each great wall? Along with Huilan Infotech, the curatorial team developed an AI curator that brings voice replies to questions relating to “Ethics of Technology.”

Xiaice

Mysterious phone calls at the exhibition hall? Well, the calls were actually made by “Xiaoice,” a chatbot service developed by Microsoft and Uxin app. Similar to the operating system named “Samantha” from the film “Her,” Xiaoice is now able to have seamless conversation with humans.

“Ethics of Technology” Map

BMAB is very honored to have QIU Zhijie, the founder of “Mapping the World” project, with us in this exhibition and brainstorm his ideas for “ethics of technology” on a large hand-drawn map.

QIU Zhijie

Qiu Zhijie was born in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China, in 1969. He graduated from the Printmaking department at China Academy of Art in 1992 and started to become active in the contemporary art scene. He is a professor at the School of Inter-media Art at China Academy of Art, he works and lives in Beijing and Hangzhou.

B3 Special

Selected by B3 Moving Image Biennial, some outstanding movies and short films were exhibited.

Rotraut Pape

Filmmaker, artist, university professor. Born 1956 in Berlin, studied fine art experimental film at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. She specialized early on the media of film/video/computer, though was interested less in their technological possibilities – although she mastered these with virtuosity – than in their artistic potential to develop formulations for interrogating society politically and ethically. Performance and installation play a major role in her work, both as actual performances and as interactive experimental arrangements.Screenings, exhibitions, publications and talks at home and abroad.

B3 feature films

Film Academy Babelsberg

QR Code Pillar

photo credit : Kin Lo

Thanks to our curatorial team, the massive amount of information shared on the BMAB walls was only a scan away!

BMAB+B3 Participating Artists

Art Experimentation of "Science"

YunChul Kim

Berlin-based artist Yunchul Kim works within the realm of contemporary media art based on scientific research, the exploration of chemical substances and audiovisual effects. The resulting objects not only visualize a kinetic experiment but also a living organism that interacts with its environment.

Matt Hope

Matt Hope was born in 1976 in London. He studied at Chelsea School of Art, received his BFA at the Winchester School of Art, and later earned his MFA at University of California. He came to China in 2008, Inspired by the local natural and social environment, and had been discovering the numerous and affluent production materials and components in Chinese market, Hope created a series of kinetic and sound installation, such as the “Tower series", "People's power station" and the "Breathing" Bike”; In the meantime, Hope also produce a group of large scale granite sculptures and the stainless steel installation “Tool Series”, etc.

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Krzysztof Wodiczko is Professor in Residence of Art, Design and the Public Domain at the GSD. He is renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than eighty such public projections around the world. Since the late 1980s, his projections have involved the active participation of marginalized and estranged city residents. Simultaneously, he has been designing and implementing a series of nomadic instruments and vehicles with homeless, immigrant, and war veteran operators for their survival and communication.

Brendan Warford

Brendan Warford coming from electric engineering and architecture background, entering the art field in his early 20’s. His work and method is versatile and multi-faceted, involving objects, daily seeing mundane performances, body related works, installations, and video medium etc. His works aim to open up and claim a new space of his own where there may not even be a slightest niche.

Hybrid Space Lab

Frans Vogelaar

Hybrid Space Lab is a think tank and design lab that focuses on cultural innovation. It is founded by Prof. Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Prof. Frans Vogelaar. Hybrid Space Lab is an interdisciplinary office where architects, urbanists, landscape architects and planners, designers and media artists collaborate with soft- and hardware engineers in the development of projects for combined analog and digital, urban, architectural, design, and media spaces. As a research, development and design practice, Hybrid Space Lab focuses on the hybrid fields emerging through the combination and fusion of environments, objects, and services.

Stephen Vitiello

As an artist, I work primarily with sound. Over the last 20 years, I have focused on sound installations that investigate conceptual ideas in relation to the given site, architecture, acoustics and cultural context of the exhibition space.I have also created soundtracks for visual artists, created and collaborated on CDs and performances. An important ongoing part of my practice has been collaboration, which has included working with incredible sound artists and composers; visual artists (Julie Mehretu, Joan Jonas); poets and writers; Tanner Upthegrove for spatial processing and scientists.

BMAB+B3 Participating Artists

Art Experimentation of "Big Data"

Jonathan Harris

Jonathan Harris (b. Aug 27, 1979) is a visual artist, known for his work with data and storytelling. Combining elements of computer science, cartography, anthropology, photography, and ritual, his artworks explore the mysteries of life — especially the ways that humans are transforming reality through different kinds of technology.

XU Bing

Xu Bing is a Chinese-born artist who lived in the United States for eighteen years. Currently residing in Beijing, he used to serve as the vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is most known for his printmaking skills and installations pieces, as well as his creative artistic use of language, words, and text and how they have affected our understanding of the world.

JODI

JODI is an art collective between two net artists based in the Netherlands: Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. Since the mid-1990s JODI have been a part of the net.art movement. They have explored, created and de-constructed: computer/video games, computer softwares, and the interfaces of web browsers with its commands, codes and errors.

aaajiao

aaajiao, is the online handle of Xu Wenkai, a Shanghai-based new media artist, avid blogger and free thinker. Born in 1984, aaajiao grew up in Xi’an in the year of 1984, coinciding with George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, seems to explain the perfect alignment between the vivid SciTech-driven imagination and the sometimes-poetic sophistication, frequently seen as the main theme of aaajiao’s work. Many of aaajiao’s works tap into the most current trends of thoughts around the Internet sphere, with a focus on the emerging controversies and phenomenon related to data processing, blogsphere/wemedia and filtered information.

Joe Hamilton

Joe Hamilton (b. 1982 Tasmania) makes use of technology and found material to create intricate and complex compositions online, offline and in-between. His recent work questions our established notions of the natural environment within a society that is becoming increasingly networked.Hamilton holds a BFA from the University of Tasmania and an MA from RMIT in Melbourne. His work has been shown to great extent internationally with recent group exhibitions at The Moving Museum Istanbul, The Austrian Film Museum, Zuckerman Museum and The New Museum in New York.

Studio Richard Vijgen

Studio Richard Vijgen is a studio for contemporary information culture, which investigates new strategies to find big stories in big data through research and design. The work is rooted in the digital domain but always connects with physical or social space. Studio Richard Vijgen produces interactive data visualisations and installations ranging from microscopic to architectural in scale and uses code, pixels and 3D printers to describe the world. Richard teaches Information Design and Interactive Architecture at the Arnhem School of Art and Design.

MIAO Ying

Miao Ying is an internet artist who currently resides on the Internet, the Chinese Internet (the Great Fire Wall) and her smartphone. She has been focusing on internet art with an emphasis on the Great Fire Wall. Her work also explores self-censorship, which is the source of creativity of the Chinese internet, and has given rise to much more interesting and creative forms of self expression by Chinese netizens, such as memes, video sharing with bullet comments and WeChat gif stickers.

BMAB+B3 Participating Artists

Art Experimentation of "Bio-Genetics"

Heather Dewey-Hagborg

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who is interested in art as research and critical practice.

Marta de Menezes

Marta de Menezes's work explores the possibilities modern biology offers to artists. Thus, she have been developing the use of biology and biotechnology as new art media, conducting my practice in research laboratories that are my art studio. Marta have been trying not only to portrait the recent advances of biological sciences, but to incorporate biological material as a way to convey an artistic discourse not possible with a different medium: DNA, proteins and cells offer an opportunity to explore novel ways of representation and communication.

Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web'80s, Eduardo Kac emerged in the early '90s with his radical works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of robotics, biology and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience to the cultural impact of biotechnology; from the changing condition of memory in the digital age to distributed collective agency; from the problematic notion of the "exotic" to the creation of life and evolution.

SPUTNIKO!

Sputniko! is a British/Japanese artist who creates machines, robotics, music and video exploring issues surrounding technology and pop culture. A graduate of London's Royal College of Art, Sputniko!' s graduation piece Menstruation Machine-Takashi’s Take (2010), a device simulating bleeding and pain to mimic that of menstruation in order to allow men to understand the experience, was the first of her projects which caused ripples in the contemporary art scene and was just months later exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Since then, Sputniko! has continued to produce playful and cross-boundary work examining technology of everyday life, and has presented her film and installation works internationally in museums.

LU Yang

Lu Yang graduated from China Academy of Art in 2010 and has so far produced a series of boundary-pushing multimedia works that explore neuroscience, mortality and religion.

BMAB+B3 Participating Artists

Art Experimentation of "Mix Reality"

Johan Knattrup Jensen & Mads Dambsbo

Doghouse

photo credit : Kin Lo

The table is set for five and on each plate awaits a pair of video-glasses and head-phones. You sit down, put on the glasses and headphones, and instantly a film opens and you are a part of it. You are at a family dinner. Mum and dad have made roast beef. Older brother has brought his new girlfriend home for the first time. And little brother is trying to avoid the inevitable disaster.

Don’t Follow the Wind

What can art do in an ongoing catastrophe, when destruction and contamination have made living impossible? "Don't Follow the Wind" is an ongoing exhibition taking place inside the restricted Fukushima exclusion zone which established in the wake of the 2011 disaster that contaminated the area separating residents from their homes, land, and community. New works developed by participating Japanese and international artists are installed in the zone at four sites lent by former residents – a home, warehouse, farm and a recreation center - all of which are contaminated and were evacuated immediately after the disaster.

Keiichi Matsuda

Keiichi Matsuda is a future-facing designer and film-maker. He works as an independent consultant, and runs a multidisciplinary design studio at the intersection of technology, media and architecture. The studio works on concept design, sculpture/installation, interaction and more, exploring how emerging technology will impact our future lives. Keiichi's approach is artistic, experimental and research-led, focusing on the dissolving boundaries between virtual and physical. His training in architecture coupled with his passion for video and interactive media has lead to a diverse skill-set, which he brings to commissions as well as a large number of self-initiated projects.

photo credit : Kin Lo

LANG Xuebo

As a contemporary artist, Lang Xuebo's art works spanning from painting, installation, photography and many other fields have been exhibited in many art institutions such as National Art Museum of China, Shanghai Art Museum, etc.The diagonal black and yellow stripes are derived from the roadblock in the social space. These stripes imply potential dangerous, every change of the convex parts indicate restless power behind safety. In this work, the complication and diversity of boundary, safety, isolation, gender and ethics project the contradiction and expectation of psychological reality through virtual reality.

TIAN Xiaolei

Digital media art is the carrier of my creation, I am interested in the uncertainty of the rapid iteration in this era and interested in the relationship between life science and technology, also in the future evolution in this new species produced by the hybrid age. I use the artist's perspective to create the future world specimens, blend of history, religion, science and technology, the body, and to create the new artistic experience.

WANG Zhi, LIU Yantao, ZHOU Yin

Wang Zhi, Liu Yantao and Zhou Yin are based in Beijing. They are dedicated to exploring new possibilities of arts.

ABE VR

Hammerhead VR

Collisions

Lynette Wallworth

To the Edge of the Earth

Clare Langan

ARTE

ARTE 360

photo credit : Kin Lo

A Retrospective by Rotraut Pape

Nicolas Gebbe - "Scalarat"

Sriram Srivigneswaramoorthy - "PROTOKOLL"

photo credit : Kin Lo

BMAB+B3 Participating Artists

Art Experimentation of "Artificial Intelligence"

STELARC

STELARC is a performance artist and a Distinguished Research Fellow of School of Design & Art, Curtin University Perth.This is a time of Circulating Flesh, Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh. A time of extreme absence and alien experience. Of bodies performing in remote spaces with split physiologies and multiple agencies, where bodies are simultaneously possessed and performing. Being neither one nor the other, being neither here nor there, but partly present and mostly absent. Subjectively, the body now experiences itself as a more extruded system, rather than an enclosed structure. Bodies are inadequate, empty, involuntary, and absent to their agency. We are living in an age of excess and indifference. Of prosthetic augmentation and extended operational systems. An age of Organs Without Bodies, of organs awaiting bodies.

PETERMFRIESS

PETERMFRIESS was born in Munich, Germany and lives now in Brussels, Belgium. While finishing Ph.D. studies in space technology and self-organising social systems in the Nineties, he also attended classes in visual composition with Paulwitz-Matthäi in Hamburg. Stimulated by theatre, contemporary dance, new technologies and philosophy, he mixes visual arts, installation practices, digital/net art and performance approaches for a participatory exchange with the audience. The focus is on the conceptual transformation of situations and questions about the evolution of our society into emotional and aesthetic values.

Yuri Suzuki

Yuri Suzuki is a sound artist, designer and electronic musician who produces work that explores the realms of sound through exquisitely designed pieces and raises questions of the relation between sound and people and how music and sound affect people's minds. In 2013, he started teaching at Royal College of Art London and also began an associate position for Disney, New Radiophonic Workshop and Teenage Engineering. During the same year, he founded Yuri Suzuki Ltd. (YS Lab) which is an R&D consultancy working with several companies including Google, Panasonic and Disney.

WU Juehui

Wu Juehui is the cutting-edge artist of China's new media art. In recent years, he focuses on the "potential interface" between art and science, between body and media in collaboration with institutes such as Tsinghua University, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University. In 2010, Wu Juehui and Shao Ding founded the art group "MeatMedia", focusing on the "Emotional Interface" in an attempt to find a balance between the "Dry media" and the" Wet media". Wu Juehui is also a co-founder of "UFO media lab" – the leading new media artist collective in China that focuses on the social application of new media art.