After having visited Australia and New Zealand in part 1 of our journey through the Ars Electronica Gardens and around the globe, we are now heading west. The continent has 44.6 million square kilometers – that’s about a third of the Earth’s total land mass. With over four billion people, it is also home to more than half the world’s population. Diverse, colorful, large, loud, quiet, spacious and urban: we are talking about Asia.
Just as diverse as the continent itself are the gardens and projects that have their origins there and which we can look forward to at the Ars Electronica Festival 2020. The following selection is intended to give you a glimpse of what can be experienced both physically and virtually in Asia between September 9 and 13.
Ars Electronica Garden Bangkok: Garlic Med.Eat.Ation
The Psych Garden, located in Bangkok, uses the physical and the spiritual to guide visitors through different levels of existence and offers virtual tours of Thailand’s tastes, sights, sounds and energies. A special highlight is thereby “Garlic Med.Eat.Ation” by Jennifer Katanyoutanant (US/TH), Grace Cong Xin Wong – Art Farm (US/HK) and Zden Brungot Svíteková (SK). In this exhibition, intimacy is experienced through touch and taste – as a starting point, every visitor is encouraged to bring a clove of garlic.
Ars Electronica Garden Daejon: Biennale
The Ars Electronica Garden Deajon in South Korea is organized by the Daejeon Museum of Art . At the heart of the Garden is the Daejon Biennial, which brings together works in a biennial rhythm that utilize advanced AI technologies to open up an expanded field of artistic expression. The presented works search for possible similarities between arts that deal with things that deviate from economic logic and AI technology, which is always concerned with social benefit. The exhibition explores those areas where the two spheres overlap.
Ars Electronica Garden Hong Kong: DïaloG und WYSIWYG
Hong Kong is located at the intersection of historical, cultural, political and economic tectonic plates. This context, the School of Creative Media der City University of Hong Kong is convinced, nourishes a unique dynamic that is bursting with creativity. We would like to share with you two projects that are shown here:
Maurice Benayoun and Refik Anadol are in DïaloG in a dialogue between the works of art. From Los Angeles and Hong Kong they observe the behavior of two “aliens”, difficult newcomers who do not understand each other.
Another highlight is WYSIWYG, a large retrospective of Jeffrey Shaw’s work presented and organised by Osage Art Foundation. The exhibition at Osage Gallery Hong Kong spans an arc through the productive career of the visual media art pioneer, who was awarded a Golden Nica for Visionary Pioneer of Media Art at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2018.
Ars Electronica Garden Tsing Hua: Bitter Spring and Fruity Fall
Four exhibitions are on display at the Ars Electronica Garden Hsinchu, organized by the National Tsing Hua University. We would like to introduce one of them to you briefly:
Under the title “Bitter Spring and Fruity Fall” works of the KT Award of Technology Art, sponsored by MOST, will be exhibited. The award is the most prestigious award for digital art students in Taiwan in the categories of interactive art, digital animation and digital game. This year’s theme, “Bitter Spring and Fruity Fall” (春苦秋實), describes how we faced all kinds of difficulties in spring, but can harvest the fruits in autumn.
Ars Electronica Garden Jakarta: Virtual Tour Journey of Tea Plantation in Indonesia
The Ars Electronica Garden Jakarta aka “Prisma Garden”, Media Art Globale (MAG) by Connected Art Platform presents the work of five different Indonesian artists. In their works they deal with their views on the current situation of society and enrich it with their own interpretations. One of the exhibited works is called “Virtual Tour Journey of Tea Plantation in Indonesia” by Motionbeast and is just that – a virtual journey to West Java, from the Indonesian highlands to the breakfast tables of the world.
Ars Electronica Garden Lviv: Future from the Past
Under the title “Future from the Past,” the Ars Electronica Garden Lviv draws our attention to little-known stories about the late Soviet media amateurs and the peripheral infrastructure for space exploration. Only a few objects left, such as the Lviv Observatory, recall the rivalry between socialist and capitalist visions of the future and the human desire to reach outer space. Opposed to this is and has always been the inability to preserve the earthly present. Through interviews, films and video art, the past comes to life again for a short time in Lviv’er Garden. Partners in this undertaking are the Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe, Lviv, the Lviv Astronomical Observatory, the State Space Agency of Ukraine and the Center for Urban History.
Ars Electronica Garden Seoul: Third Garden
The Ars Electronica Garden Seoul of the Korea National University of Arts represents under the title “Third Garden” a man-made nature and reflects the future garden in the age of Third Life. This is where reality and virtuality meet and interact in various conferences, online exhibitions, performances, workshops and research on Seoul’s urban garden at Mozilla Hubs. The coexistence between humans, nature and digital networks is at the center of all questions.
One performance of the Third Garden is “Two Hands”. Here traditional Korean shamanism is combined with a contemporary media performance. The artists pose the question: “Can future technology dominate the human mind and soul?
Ars Electronica Garden St. Petersburg: Wandering Garden Boat
The Pangardenia project consists of four paths: Parniki, which are the artists at home, abandoned gardens represented by semi-closed universities, traveling gardens in the form of an artistic boat trip, and post-human gardens exploring new ways of life.
The Wandering Garden Boat is the main event of the Wandering Gardens. It takes artists, scientists and curators on a water journey on the Neva, with performances and readings. The journey is accompanied by water and air drones that collect data on the composition and pollution of the river. During the journey, a central element is the interaction between people, online visitors and machines among themselves and with the aquatic ecosystem, the structural framework of the city.
Ars Electronica Garden Tokyo: Japanese Media Art
Tokyo, the city of cyberspace, of high-tech, of wired culture. At the Ars Electronica Garden Tokyo, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Government of Japan, together with the Japan Media Arts Festival, is exploring the question of the reason for this. The aim is to do so by taking a journey back to the origins of media art. Highlights of the journey include an exhibition with Daito Manabe, Yasuaki Kakehi and Miyu Hosoi, and a performance by Dommune. The organizers invite the audience: “We hope you can visit Tokyo virtually, enjoy it and reflect together on the future of media art.
Ars Electronica Garden Yamaguchi: Garden of Threads
The YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media) Garden is the artistic answer to the Covid 19 era. What does appreciation for an artwork look like? Who is the physical audience for art? YCAM deals with different forms of expression closely related to media technology, this time two types of content are presented: live performance and art on the web. “quartets”, for example, is a performance that takes place purely as a video stream. Eight musicians improvise by imagining a session together with the other musicians. The resulting performances are randomly mixed or combined, creating a new piece of music each time. These quartets stand for the isolated situation that we all know or have known all too well at the moment.
You’ll find a list of all the Gardens as well as an insight into all the projects that can be seen at the Ars Electronica Festival from September 9 to 13 here.