Opening ALiVE: Discover the Future of Creativity in Hong Kong

26 June - 29 June

Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment

Hong Kong Science Park, Pak Shek Kok, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong

Long home to the pioneering moving image alternative space Videotage, Hong Kong has recently seen a flurry of interest in new media as a component of mainstream contemporary art. Following the opening of Input/Output Gallery last year, the City University Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment has now arrived to make its mark. Founded by Jeffrey Shaw, the laboratory wisely avoids reference to art proper, instead announcing itself within the vocabulary of cinema, architecture, gaming, media, design, and research. This is fortunate; though Shaw played an integral role in the early stages of the evolution of the media art discourse, that particular style of work has appeared increasingly irrelevant as artists working with technology have voiced a desire for greater inclusion within the commercial and archival institutions of contemporary art. Indeed, nothing presented in this inaugural exhibition could conveniently be interpreted as art per se: Jeffrey Shaw and Bernd Lintermann have installed "Cupola: Look Up," a suspended semi-spherical projection screen that mimics dome architectural features; Shaw and Sarah Kenderdine present "Eye of Nagaur," which allows touristic explanation of an historical archaeological site; the collaborative project "T_Visionarium," with contributions from Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Matthew McGinity, Jeffrey Shaw, and Peter Weibel, encourages viewers standing in an immersive cylinder to arrange thousands of television clips into new narratives.

But the question remains: if the new media discourse has moved beyond such pedestrian demonstrations of technological capability, what more can such an exhibition contribute? If it isn't art, what is it? Artist and writer Golan Levin recently noted a paradoxical situation in which media organizations fail to see value in media art research, while simultaneously appropriating the general aesthetics and innovations inherent to that culture. It may follow that much of this new media research should not be termed art at all; if so many media artists accurately predicted and even produced the applications for later corporate developments, perhaps it is time to allow such experimentation to migrate back to the territory of design. The collapse of new media art as a discourse could be a highly productive move that would pull issues of technology and media into the art world while encouraging the less aesthetically and conceptually oriented aspects to find space within the categories named above--cinema, architecture, gaming, and so on--in hopes that these legacies could be both preserved and respected within the proper genealogy.

--Robin Peckham

(Photo courtesy of Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment and artist)