Hong Kong, May 16 – 22, 2016, http://isea2016.isea-international.org/
ISEA is a conference/symposium dedicated to electronic arts. Not an exhibition or festival, but still centered on the topic of art and creation in digital art. The main difference to “usual” art events has been a certain inward-orientation of the event which has not been advertised publicly and reserved to the selected few who paid the 2000 – 3000 HKD registration fee. Nevertheless the exhibition associated with the week-long event has been located within the freely accessible locations of three Hong Kong universities that participated in the organization of the event (PolyU, CityU, HKU), if one found out about its existence.
The artworks varied from great to less so, but overall, it was worthy to see once certain obstacles were overcome. There were no artwork labels or explanations next to the exhibits, only information boards at a few locations. All the details on the artworks have been kept in a catalogue available for purchase. Given the “academic-ness” and (over)complexity of many works, this was a shortcoming. Also, given the short one week duration, little has been invested in exhibition architecture, and the majority of exhibits consisted of smaller or larger screens and projections placed throughout the buildings. Walking from screen to screen, trying to figure out what the work is about or how it works could be a bit challenging. On the positive side, there have been many volunteers around that made sure none of the exhibits “died,” which happens much too often in media art exhibits: all the artworks here were working perfectly. Following a few images from one of the exhibition location at CityU’s Creative Media Centre.
Don Ritter, Burning Too, 2016, mapping projection of a burning fire on the CMC facade
Stefan Tiefengraber, WM_EX10 WM_A28 TCM_200DV BK26, 2014-2015, audiovisual noise performance; noise made by short-circuiting electric currents inside of consumer-grade electronics through touching its insides with wet fingers; visuals made by connecting audio out to video in
Eric Siu, The Unuseless Machine for Democracy, 2014, a date (9/28) signifying the day when the umbrella protesters in Hong Kong clashed with police using tear gas and force to clear the street (unsuccessfully)
Brad Todd, Collimation, 2015-2016; two webcams looking at each other, images including image recognition algorithms shown on monitors
Nurit Bar-Shai, Objectviy Tentative, 2012-2016; petri dishes with bacteria grown under stimulation with different soundwave frequencies
Marco De Mutiis, Vanishing, 2016, using textual descriptions of a news photograph to decay the digital image information of the photograph; print out of the decayed photograph and artist’s book with a print out of the pixel data including textual information used to corrupt them
Jane Prophet, Neuro Memento Mori Meditations on Death, 2015; video projection mapping onto a 3D printed sculpture of the artist’s head, one side including flesh, other side only skull; the mapping is based on an fMRI scan executed while the artist meditated on death
Kevin Day, The Material Couplings of Immaterial Machines, 2012, a political science university lecture accompanied by an iTunes audio visualization
Elke Reinhuber, Face Value, 2014-2015, enlarged details of eyes from portraits printed on banknotes; one could use an iPad to discover augmented reality quotes within the images
Cedric van Eenoo, Rain and Sea, 2015; a video of a sea, in black and white
Galdric Fleury, Antoine Fontaine – Wait and See, 2015, a video of a sea, computer generated, with wave activity related to financial data keywords on twitter
Martin Reiche, BNC B, 2015, a sculpture made from BNC connectors that also worked as a video mixer mixing signals from two DVD players
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