Month: September 2020

Posted on by admin Events, news, reports

AI: Love and Artificial Intelligence

!Mediengruppe Bitnik @Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing

AI is a pun. It is the pronunciation of “love” in Chinese pinyin, and at the same time, stands for “Artificial Intelligence” in English. The two alphabets express the exhibition’s focus, which is to present the love that this generation has acquired in the age of social networking. The exhibition discusses the emotional decisions under the influence of algorithms, love affairs in the online environment, and the physical intimacies in long-distance relationships (Eros); It also resonates the sympathies woven by big data, which gathers people with similar ideologies and excludes those who disagree (Philia). Luc Ferry once said that “love never comes without hatred; they are probably two inseparable passions, if only because love leads us to hate those who hurt the people we love.”

The exhibition is designed as a dichotomous structure. Inspired by the typical “swipe right to like, swipe left to dislike” mechanism, it starts with a virtual online dating app that leads the audience to two different spaces. It is a metaphor for our manipulated emotions and speaks about romantic online relationships through an intertextual narrative. These romantic relationships have been perceived as “natural” interactions without being in the same physical space, groundless affection, and even remote performances of sexual desire. For millennials, the internet provides more freedom for expressing their instinctual egos while the physical world and people seem to be distant. These subtle emotions connect to our “inner-selves” are spread across the fiber optic network ubiquitously, raising the question that if our connection to the virtual domain means the detachment to the real world. Simultaneously, the layout of the exhibition is a spatial representation of our online behavior, meaning that every time one chooses to like or dislike, click or unclick, the algorithm generates the user’s data packet and direct the online route through the privacy permissions. We have literally no authentic choice among the numerous options. By “collaborative filtering” and “autocomplete” function (e.g. “Recommended for you” on Amazon, “Who to Follow” on Twitter, and “Topic you might like” on Quora), network science follows its default logic: “Birds of a feather flock together.” It generates social bubbles, which leads to discourse polarization, the proliferation of identity politics, and deeper divisions of our cultural and political landscape.

Now connect to the Internet, type in “AI” and searched for “Love”, I see people shouting, singing, mourning, feeling, fantasizing, and contemplating in struggles about gaining and losing love. It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.[1]With regard to Love and AI, we experience the featured artists’ tales through the spectrum of their works, and rethink the emotional and technological circumstances of our time.

[1]  Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

About Curator

Jenny CHEN Jiaying, writer and curator. She is now having a PhD program of Western Philosophy at Eastern China Normal University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the Department of Art History of China Academy of Art and received her Master of Arts degree from Lancaster University in the UK. She has contributed to media such as Artforum (CN), Artshard and NOWNESS. Recent Projects include: “Copernicus”, E.M.Bannister Gallery of Rhode Island College, Providence, U.S.A (2019); “Li Hanwei: Liquid Health”, Goethe Space, Shanghai (2019); “First edition of the Shanghai Curators Lab”, Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai (2018). Jenny’s other academic activities include the First Annual Conference of Network Society “Forces of Reticulation” roundtable and Huayu Forum of Art, etc.


Her article “Post-Internet Art Inside and Outside the Chinternet” was included in the collection of essays Forces of Reticulation published by China Academy of Art Press. Co-writing and editing of Shanghai Contemporary Art Archival Project 1998-2010, was published by MOUSSE in 2017.

About Hyundai Blue Prize

The Hyundai Blue Prize prioritizes creativity and sustainability over experience level when evaluating applicants. Each year, emerging Chinese curators submit exhibition proposals based on a theme that reflects Hyundai’s long-term vision. Up to six shortlisted curators will be offered a ‘One-on-One Mentorship’ from junior and senior jury members, who help applicants to prepare their final proposals, make connections within the art world, and explore their full potential.

About Hyundai Motorstudio

Hyundai Motorstudios are brand experience spaces that reflect the company’s artistic spirit and experimental approach to art, design and technology. This is where “motor,” a word used in the automobile industry, and “studio,” a word used to describe a space for contemplation and creation, meet in a manner accessible to the public.

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Screen Walk with Zaiba Jabbar

Screen Walk with Zaiba Jabbar
Dressing Your Digital Identity

Zaiba Jabbar explored the artistic and creative community working with face filters and augmented reality, redefining notions of identity and reality. She shared her curatorial experience in the field, introducing some of the emerging artists and practices which are transforming contemporary visual culture and the role of networked images. She was joined by Maria Than, Scarlett Yang and Mathilde Rougier in a discussion about augmented realities, sustainability and feminism, period awareness and activism. The Screen Walk was followed by the live stream workshop on upcycling with AR by artist Mathilde Rougier. 

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In Dark Times We Must Dream With Open Eyes @dorothea.space

dorothea.space in Fontana
In Dark Times we Must Dream with Open Eyes

In Dark Times We Must Dream With Open Eyes

Nico Vascellari‘s flag In Dark Times We Must Dream With Open Eyes makes it all the way to Gozo as it flies outside Dorothea Space Gozo. Visit blitzvalletta.com to purchase your own flag for €40 and support @africanmediamalta @foodbanklifeline #bluedoorenglishmalta #maltamicrofinance. More flag locations around Valletta will be added soon. Join our initiative and fly the flag at your own location.

#nicovascellari #contemporaryart #malta #blitzvalletta @africanmediamalta @foodbanklifeline @nicovascellari @artscouncilmalta @vcamalta @code.lunga @saradolfiagostini

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PLA(N)Tform @Ars Electronica

PLA(N)T

Our colleagues from RIXC presented PLA(N)T during Ars Electronica.

PLA(N)Tform is a virtual ‘organism’ in which digital and biological actors grow and evolve in ‘ecosystemic’ relations. It is a speculative experiment of ‘terrestrial co-existence’ transforming biological, techno-scientific and atmospheric processes into a space-time of ‘planthropocene’ – gardens for human-plant ‘involution’.

The PLA(N)Tform at Ars Electronica will evolve into a virtual garden connecting live video concert from the Forest Garden Greenhouse in Riga and Virtual BioSensing exhibition as well as ‘growing, sensing and making kin-ship’ performances in Karlsruhe.

PLA(N)Tform

The PLA(N)Tform is a virtual organism in which both natural and artificial actors grow and evolve together, in the darkness of an infinite space of potentialities. The PLA(N)Tform grows in Deleuzian and Guattarian “rhizomatic” proliferations while it is nourished by luminous seeds, each containing their own “naturally artificial” worlds. By juxtaposing the different realities in a heterogeneous plurality, the PLA(N)Tform is understood as a speculative experiment of Latour’s “terrestrial co-existence.” Epistemological and aesthetic practices, far removed from hierarchical mechanisms, merge into a space-time of planthropocene” – Natasha’s Myers envisioned gardens for plant-people “involution.”

The PLA(N)Tform at Ars Electronica will evolve into a virtual garden connecting the live video concert from the Forest Garden Greenhouse in Riga and Virtual BioSensing exhibition in Karlsruhe, featuring the artworks that eco-systematically explore the forests and underwater world creating Reversed gardens, Forest stories and Floating woodlands; grow telegraph-plants and mimosa to explore devices for tracking and visualizing the plant-movement; use photogrammetry to create virtual Nature nostalgia environments in the times of isolation; make sensing experiments to explore human-plant kin-ship; investigate herbal tea making traditions, and engage in Home-Sick Farming activities that manifest in plant-growing and sharing, and cooking performances.

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Out of Time – Exhibition of recent work by Vince Briffa

The exhibition Out of Time presents a collection of works on paper and mixed-media paintings selected from the last ten years of the artist’s studio production, including work produced during the Covid-19 lockdown.The exhibition centres on the artist’s ongoing concern of our relationship with time and what it means for a human being to exist temporally in the stretch that we call our lifetime.The works exhibited are selected from the following bodies of work:The Terrain Vague Series (2010-2011): The concern with attempting to locate and to define the undetermined divide between two opposing forms. In landscape theory, the concept of terrain vague, wasteland or ambiguous space, refers to the undescribed territory that separates the city from nature. The artist used this termas metaphor for our relationship with our surroundings.Two works entitled “Between Ash and Dust” are shown from this collection. The works in charcoal and mixed media on wood, speak of implausible distances and detached spaces splitting up such evasive elements as smoke and sky. They are as much about the process of drawing/painting as they are about the current war imagery of destruction taken from tabloids or television. These metaphoric memorials sway unclearly between human intervention and natural phenomena and embody an act of restitution through the same material they are made of (charcoal being fire’s residue), a destructive force embalmed through its very remains.The Lichtung Series (2019 – today): This ongoing series of works were inspired by Martin Heidegger’s term Lichtung as the “Clearing”, and makes reference to Heidegger’s quote: “In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs.There is a clearing, a lighting… Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.”The artist uses this title to refer to a series of works that relate to the genre of the landscape,but plays with the philosopher’s definition in German, ‘eine Lichtung ist,’ literally meaning‘a clearing is,’ suggesting the kind of clearing one finds in the woods or the forest, where light seeps through the less dense parts of the branches precisely referring to the ‘lightened’ patch of the forest. The artist is, however, more interested in Heidegger’s use of ‘Lichtung ’in the sense of ‘shedding light’ on something, referring to our capacity to give meaning(in this case to landscape) through our own memory. The works therefore refer to the artist’s memory as the shedding light that creates these ‘could have been’ landscapes, a tribute to Simon Schama’s assertion in his book ‘Landscape and Memory’ that “Before it can ever bea repose for the sen ses, landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much fromstrata of memory as from layers of rock.”The Mounds, Canifantasma and Nell’Ombra della Torre Series (2018): These collections of works were created in Umbria, Italy during the artist’s residency at Civitella Ranieri castle in 2018. The works selected for the exhibition are a direct reaction to the experience of space and history on the artist.The ‘Mounds’ collection, are the more abstract and take their inspiration from landscape forms around the area. These works preceded and also fed the current ‘Lichtung’ series.The ‘Canifantasma’ and ‘Nell’ Ombra della Torre’ series were inspired by the history and architecture of the Civitella Castle in Umbria and the Ranieri family who were the original owners of the castle.The Swath Series (2020): The series which started during the COVID-19 outbreak is inspired by rituals of birth and death in historical and contemporary societies.The title ‘swath’ as the noun and ‘swathe’ as the verb reference the way we envelope both babies at birth and corpses in bags prior to burial.The series concerns the aesthetics of the clothing at the two extremes of the human lifespan(birth and death) and reflects the ‘thrown projection’ into this world (and its consequential abrupt truncation through death) in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’. The works, which show bodies wrapped in what seems like a cloth or a swathe of bandages, equally make reference to news images of Covid fatalities and to victims of a road accident or death at sea. These forms have a striking resemblance to the swathing of newly-born babies throughout history.

Also of interest: SPLEEN

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ILUM @Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Immersive Laboratory University of Malta (ILUM)

Adnan Hadzi presented ‘Immersive Laboratory University of Malta: Artistic Doctorate Visual Pedagogies’ at the Eleventh International Conference on the Image.

As communicative landscapes are increasingly driven by the visual, there is a demand to put ‘the image’ at the center of research practices and educational methodologies. In turn, there is a call for a focus on new approaches to making sense of location, use, and analysis of the image in pedagogical contexts. The 2020 special focus attempts to provoke thinking through the image by: encounters – the personal, social and inter-connectedness of experience to the viewer; place – the where and how of transmission, situatedness and reception; ecologies – appearing within the image, systems, cultures, and context; design – the nature of action in experience and interpretation, from the historical, contemporary, to imaging future worlds. What creative ecologies can be re-imagined in the shared practices of image makers and educators that leads to the development of critical thinking to transform visual experience?