EXHIBITION – Buds about to Blossom (含苞待放)

Complementary to the KT exhibition, the Tsing Hua Garden also hosts a Nursery Garden called “Buds about to Blossom (含苞待放).” This exhibition provides a stage for our younger artists in NTHU, with 4 artworks:

Flower Illuminating Forest (光花照林)
This is a custom artwork for ARS 2020. A forest is illuminated by a flower, symbolizing that global gardens are illuminated by ARS 2020. This artwork visualizes the climate data gathered by our campus smart street lamp, including temperature, humidity, rain, and air quality. We also combine it with the COVID-19 screening data in our campus. The data will be transformed into rhythm and pattern, and interactively displayed by the installation in light art.
(Artists: HSCC Lab & FBI Lab)

COVID Flower Everywhere (肺花遍野)
In our campus during the COVID-19 epidemic, people were “qualified” to enter any building only if they got a tiny circle sticker that confirmed their body temperature was below 37°C. After the epidemic wore off, people began to relax or even forget the changes brought about by the epidemic. So we will carry out an action to let students lie quietly in Yuehan Pavilion and recall the impact of COVID-19 on our life through the audio/video art projected in the ceiling of the pavilion.
(Curators: Su-Chu Hsu & Chen-Hua Lu)

Crazy Zero 2 (瘋狂的兩個0點)
Crazy Zero 2 is a wire sculpture generated with the system of “Multi-View Wire Algorithm”, and we use 3D line printing technology to turn virtual models into tangible objects. We choose the images of Einstein and Marilyn Monroe, who are both famous crazy icons in history, to let these two geniuses “meet” in the virtual space while they are combined in one in reality. From multiple angles of view, the audience can only see the complete face of Einstein or Marilyn Monroe when they are standing at the zero-degree angle of a particular side, the slightest deviation (even -1 or +1
degree of angle) will affect the clearness of images. Usually, truth cannot be seen until a particular moment, this very moment is like the fact that a particular data can only represent a particular point in the virtual world, we can only see the right image while standing at the zero point. Crazy Zero 2 shows the combination of two crazy celebrities in real space, and the zero point presents such craziness.
(Artists: Jiaxing Sun, Yinan Sheng, Kai-Wen Hsiao, Hung-Kuo Chu & Su-Chu Hsu)

Mingled Sensations in ConvNets (卷積層的千絲萬縷)
Recently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has flourished in diverse areas. In the era of AI, our concept is to create an AI system that showcases its perception, then we reveal its primality and ingenuity in the computing process by installation art. We built the convolutional neural network (ConvNet, or CNN), which is a state-of-art AI model, and specializes in visual recognition and image generation. First, we designed and trained ConvNets that can analyze images and transform their local perception layer-by-layer to the corresponding Chinese pictograms. Then, a set of installation art pieces that transforms the digital structure of CNN to an analog representation is constructed to visualize the algorithmic and structural details of ConvNets, which emphasizes neural activations and model weights. Unlike most existing AI artworks created to demonstrate the power of AI, or to show the reflection on the influence of AI to human society, we expect this work would help people have a better understanding of the inside architecture of the modern AI system, and appreciate the beauty of its complexity.
(Artists: Chen-Hua Lu, Po-Yao Wu, Che-Rung Lee & Su-Chu Hsu)