Historians of the future may call today's Big Bang-like explosion of digital technology and cyber cultures as the beginning of humanity's first global renaissance.

Eager to help design the planet's cultural evolution, China has sketched out a five-year master plan to ignite sparks of creativity across the country. A matrix of centers for Internet-age innovation are planned to animate cities crisscrossing China.

As part of this plan, the Millennium Art Museum is set to unveil its Beijing Centre for Creativity. This hybrid arts space is both showcase and studio, a web-wired museum and factory embedded with multi-media machinery to turn out digital dream works. "The Beijing Centre for Creativity will be a globe-connected space for conceiving, creating and displaying multimedia art, art films, digital video, interactive art, installation art, 3-D animation, online games and art, information technology design, graphic design, architectural design and fashion design," said Wang Yudong, one of the dynamic young founders of the centre.

This centre marked a new step in the Millennium's transformation into China's first World Art Museum, said Wang, who is also vice-head of western Beijing's Millennium Art Museum.

Leading-edge techno-art outposts across Europe, including Germany's ZKM Centre for Art and Media, the Netherlands' V2 Institute for Unstable Media, and Austria's Ars Electronica, will all contribute artworks and artists, thinkers and technology to the open studio at the Beijing Centre.

Although engineers are still completing its hyper-tech connections to cyberspace and film screen-animated atrium, the Beijing Centre for Creativity has already staged its first exhibition, the recent Code: Blue new-media show.

The Code: Blue exhibition, with its clusters of new constellations and new stars in the firmament of avant-garde art and digital design, also acted as a crystal ball, portending a measure of what's ahead for the Beijing Centre.

Earth series

Perhaps the Code's most fascinating entry was the multi-colored micro-cosmos created by German Ingo Gunther with his Worldprocessor series of globes. In a space as dark as a planetarium, Gunther positioned dozens of his illuminated Earth spheres, each unique and created to illustrate issues, such as "political conflicts, socio-economic studies, environmental problems or technological developments" that face the world.

Worldprocessor's (http://worldprocessor.com/2005.html) spectrum of spheres include: a night-black globe painted with rust-red missiles to depict rocket launch sites worldwide; a cross-colour globe with arcs of shadows representing satellite footprints; a dusk-hued, graffiti-sprayed sphere with the word "Globe" in a polyglot of languages. It features a border-mapped globe with dark polygons representing refugee camps whose inhabitants are desperately seeking shelter in another sector of the planet.

Gunther said we actually lived on many planets at once, distinct places washed by varying waves of information and people flows and of television and cyber-broadcasts.

His 1,000-plus Worldprocessor globes aim to map these discrete worlds.

"On traditional globes, the world is outlined in common, recognizable codes: Lines depict borders and specific colors depict mountains or forests," Gunther said. "In the age of globalism, there is much more that is worth charting on a globe than political borders, cities and coastlines."

Yet he explained the Earth was spinning through change so quickly that he was forced to turn out Worldprocessors faster to map these transformations.

"My project, though intended to be as instant an interface to the world as possible, is inherently outdated the moment I present the work," he said.

Gunther said he might begin creating globes that could map out alternative, utopian futures for the planet, and was talking with the creators of Google's Virtual Earth to develop Web-based Worldprocessors.

Digital artwork

The digital media exhibition, which next year will be staged at the new Centre for Creativity, also shined a spotlight on "The Third Eye" by artist Jin Jiangbo.

Jin created a "digital tunnel" linking two cities, in China and in France, with video cameras and displays that allowed citizens to see and communicate with each other in real time.

Placing the video screens inside installations resembling circular brick water wells added to the illusion that a fantastic hole had been burrowed between China's Chengdu and France's Montpelier, with cross-cultural images and ideas racing across the two cities at the speed of light.

Another futuristic artwork, created by architects, writers and designers from China to Europe, took the form of an iceberg cosmopolis called "Freeze."

This free-floating city is both oasis and utopia, an ocean-roaming refuge in a post-9/11 "time of increased global tension and intensified censorship," said Adrian Hornsby, one of the members of the Dynamic City Foundation (www.dynamiccity.org) that created Freeze.

The transparent crystal pyramids that cover the surface of the multi-level Freeze city could one day provide sanctuary for "the lives and ideas of an evolved humanity," explained Hornsby.

Dynamic City co-founder Neville Mars added that the project was an ever-moving "Noah's Ark of ideas roaming freely as the world's sea levels are rising." And this ark, he said, would soon navigate the waves of the World Wide Web.

Freeze is part of a new book and a new magazine that will be simultaneously launched via print media and in cyberspace. Using an interactive "wiki" platform at www.burb.tv, utopians and thinkers across the globe will be able to add their own ideas to the book, which will make this a never-ending, ever-morphing work in progress.

In what is likely to signal a trend in future art, nearly all of the exhibits at this show had a cyber-double, in the form of an interactive, Web-based incarnation.

American David Birchfield, who traveled to Beijing to assemble his robotic, gong-playing musicians in an installation called "Sustainable" (http://ame2.asu.edu/faculty/dab/), said that, in the spirit of open source freedom, "all of my works can be downloaded for free via the Internet."

Birchfield, who teaches in the arts, media and engineering program of Arizona State University, garnered a rave review from the New York Times with "Interactions," which features a duo of virtual artists that transform websites into music and images via interaction with fans.

An explorer of new frontiers in techno-art, Birchfield "sometimes got the feeling of seeing the future here in Beijing," he said, "due to the level of technology and the possibility for it to be pervasive in culture."

He added that "walking around the Beijing Centre for Creativity, you can see the big push the government is giving to art and technology."

The centre's Wang Yudong said: "Beijing aims to become a world power in digital art, and the Beijing Centre for Creativity will help spearhead that drive."

He added that the city and the centre might stage an Internet Age arts extravaganza in the summer of 2008, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics.

Wang said the new creativity outpost, and the yearly digital arts-fest, "are aimed at bringing artists and thinkers from all over the world together here in Beijing that is a perfect match with the global spirit of the Olympics."

(China Daily October 12, 2006)