(11/13/2013 – ?)
I/O Warehouse, Kwun Tong, 62 Hung To Road
In a semi-commercial space, a combination of a light design company, a mapping projection production studio showroom, an artist’s workshop and a media art showroom, IOW (which I believe stands for Input/Output Warehouse) held an event, with product demonstrations, a band performance and some media art in the showroom. Most of the media art was kind of tucked away on small LCD screens which barely gave the works justice. For Tian Xiaolei (‘Relation’) and Scott Draves (mods of his Electric Sheep project) work this was most unfortunate: Showing these works on computer monitors in standard definition… a great pity. For other works (e.g. Samson Young’s ‘Po is Ordinary’) the standard resolution and lo-fi display was acceptable, but it would benefit from a more secluded space where people could actually listen to the video instead of just walking by. Hardware-based works turned out the best, as there was not much to go wrong as long as they were good in themselves: Samson Young’s ‘Machines for Making Nothing’ was a funny commentary on the use of touchscreens in smartphones and beyond. Eric Siu’s sign series was more traditional ‘mechanical art’ that reminded me of children’s construction kits. Daniel Howe’s ‘Automatype’ which was shown on an array of 9 monitors probably had the best balance between artwork concept and presentation format. The automatically generated text/poetry on each screen created a field of expressions with constantly changing linguistic tensions among them.