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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)
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