(11/2/2013)
Microwave Festival website
The yearly Microwave Int’l New Media Arts Festival kicked off with a keynote conference that took place at the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre of CityU. The overall theme of the festival was related to space travel and that was also the central theme of the presentations.
Derrick de Kerckhove, a new media theorist, did a run through of a number of artistic projects relating to space travel. He talked about how the conquering of space – the launch of the first satellite, etc. – shifted the human perception of our selves. He coined the term of ‘Global Art’ for art that look at humanity from a perspective from outer space, as astronauts did. Then he contrasted this view with that of ‘Space Art’ which is looking in the opposite direction.
Sarah Jane Pell, an Australian artist interested in deep sea diving as a preparation for space exploration followed up. Her talk mainly centered on her practice, revolving around performance – putting her body in underwater environments, which was than indirectly linked to the on-Earth training undertaken by astronauts.
Rob La Frenais, a media art curator from the UK talked about artists and projects he curated, a loose collection of projects related to space, ranging from funny to silly.
Richard Castelli, a French media art curator and producer, presented projects he was helping to produce for artists he worked with. Most of the projects were large-scale immersive installations, 3D projections etc. He mentioned Jeffrey Shaw a few times, as many of the works relied on technology he pioneered while working at ZKM in Germany.
Masaki Fujihata spent quite some time talking about his early net art projects, which looked utterly outdated – things like setting up a webcam, etc. The connecting line reaching from his first projects up until the latest ‘gallery of screams’ was the motivation to celebrate internet as a medium connecting people and augmenting human interaction – a fact we take for granted.
Overall I found the talk of the two artists – Fujihata and Pell – as the most interesting, as they were the most competent to talk about their own work. The three curators-theorists all just overloaded the audience with a whirlwind of images, which disappeared from everyone’s mind as quickly as they disappeared from the projection screen.