Art in the Cloud | Panel Discussion IV

Protagonists (Artists / Curator presenting):
Theodora Barat (FR)
Kattie Fan (HK)
Jonathan Kemp (UK/AU)
Alexey Marfin (UK)
Kingsley NG (HK)
Royce NG (AU/HK)
Alvaro Cassinelli (UY/HK)

Panel Moderator:
Dr. Elke Reinhuber (DE/HK)

The development of media art and the online art space are both tightly enmeshed with technological innovations of their times. Art in the Cloud is a curatorial research that explores how the sudden growth of online art spaces contributes to the transformation of the presentation of media artworks. Specifically, we question how inherent characteristics such as interactivity and immersion shift in online exhibitions? How does today’s online space contribute to, or limit artistic creativity? What are some of the unexpected challenges artists have encountered? and what are some of the new potentials that emerge from the technological impediments we come across?

To facilitate the interfacing of alterities in search for unexpected synergies, we have invited artists and curators who are born or based in Hong Kong, then asked them to recommend one other artist or a curator, based on the differences in terms of artistic medium, cultural, or philosophical lineage.

This Panel Discussion is the last session of the series, featuring Theodora Barat (FR), Kattie Fan (HK), Linda Lai (HK), Jonathan Kemp (UK/AU), Alexey Marfin (US), Kingsley NG (HK), Royce NG (AU/HK) & Alvaro Cassinelli (UY/HK), and moderated by Dr. Elke Reinhuber (DE/HK).

Video

The 24 artworks will be viewable on our website throughout the festival, and an official screening and sharing of their works will take place on Zoom between the 8th and 11th September. Please join us to reflect on how art could be in line with the online.

Moderator:

Elke Reinhuber (DE/HK): Dr. Elke Reinhuber is a media artist, educator and researcher, currently living in Hong Kong and working at SCM CityU. In her work she explores different modes of presentation and strategies of storytelling to emphasise the parallel existence of multiple truths of the here and now, anchored in expanded photography and spanning into several disciplines such as time based media, immersive environments, Augmented and Virtual Reality as well as performance. Her artistic research was presented internationally, at conferences, exhibitions and festivals. eer.de

Artists:

Théodora Barat (FR): Théodora Barat (b. 1985) lives and works in Pantin, France. Barat’s artistic approach combines film, sculpture and installation. She is working on a practice-based PhD with RADIAN program and will be in residency at Villa Medici (Rome, Italy) during 2021-22. Her work has been shown at Sunken Plaza – K11 MUSEA (Hong Kong), CNEAI= (Paris), Emily Harvey Foundation and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York), Nuit Blanche (Paris), La Friche la Belle de Mai (Marseille), Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius, Lithuania), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), as well as in several international film festivals. cargocollective.com/theodorabarat

Kattie Fan (HK): As a double Master’s degree holder with a background in creative media and cultural studies, Kattie Fan is a curator, creative producer, cultural researcher and art manager specialized in media arts and cross-disciplinary arts, with networks and experience in curating and organizing large-scale projects such as ifva Awards and Festival (2009-), Cinema 2.0 (2010-), ifva Everywhere Carnival (2016-2020), Indie is… Hong Kong Independent Short Films 1995 – 2014 (2015), Animation Lab (2012), Bloomberg Emerging Artist Programme and Exhibition (2008), etc. Her recent creative projects include Chroma 11, a virtual reality dance film experience which was selected for the Biennale College Cinema VR under the Venice Film Festival. www.ifva.com

Linda Lai (HK): Linda Chiu-han Lai is a research-based interdisciplinary artist. Her videography has been shown in over 20 cities, including solo features at EXIS (Seoul), EXIM (Macau) and C3A (Cordoba, Spain). Her artistic practice concerns the politics of narrativity via montage and experimental historiography. Large-scale and site-specific installations were commissioned for the Shanghai Biennale and Pearl Lam Galleries (Singapore, Hong Kong). Her works are part of Power Station of Art’s permanent collection at Shanghai, and M+’s moving image collection. Twenty-six videos of hers (2005-2014) are archived at Video Bureau (Guangzhou and Beijing). She is a founder of Writing Machine Collective (2004 to date). In 2015, she started her experiments in participatory art as the Floating Projects, with recent published works including Our Manifestos II: Videography, Documentary Impulses (2021) and three video zine issues titled \”D-Normal/V-Essay,\” both ADC-funded. She was the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Artist of the Year in Media Art 2017. www.lindalai-floatingsite.com/content

Jonathan Kemp (UK/AU): Jonathan Kemp defragments technology in solo/collaborative material-gnostic outputs including workshops and performances, installations, experimental communicative systems, and social software events, executed across Australia, Brazil, Europe, Japan, Taiwan and the US. Media art projects include Psychogeophysics, The Crystal World, and Shift/Register, all explorations of how the earth, technology and the psyche under/overwrite and deviate each other. xxn.org.uk

Alexey Marfin (UK): Alexey Marfin is a film director interested in life in cities, making films between Los Angeles and Hong Kong. His films have screened worldwide, from Busan Film Festival to Brooklyn Film Festival. His VR film Kowloon Forest won Best Live Action VR at the 2020 Vancouver Film Festival. He has been acclaimed by Western and Asian media, including Vice, Nowness, Ming Pao Weekly, City Magazine HK, RTHK, and others. Alexey also teaches the Fiction & Entertainment postgrad program at SCI-Arc in LA. alexeymarfin.com

Kingsley NG (HK): Kingsley Ng is an inter-disciplinary artist and designer with a focus on site-specific and participatory projects. His creative practice isdriven by the belief that art can be socially relevant and transformative. His work has been shown to critical acclaim at prominent international venues such as Guangzhou Triennial, the Shanghai Expo, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial Japan, Milan Design Week and various exhibitions in France, Italy and Australia. He is the recipient of the Hong Kong Arts Development Best Artist Award (Media Arts) in 2013, and a Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Award in 2009. kingsleyng.com

Royce NG (HK): Royce NG is an artist currently based in Hong Kong working in digital media and performance who deals with the intersections of modern Asian history, trans-national trade, drugs, political economy and aesthetics. His works were featured in the 2019 exhibition ‘Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future’ at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong and in 2020, he will have his first solo presentation in Japan with ‘The Death of Manchuria…’ at ASAKUSA in Tokyo. In 2021, his works will feature in the Shanghai Biennale XIII. Opiummuseum.asia

Alvaro Cassinelli (UY/HK): Born in Uruguay, Alvaro Cassinelli is an equilibrist walking the thin line between Art and Science. He co-founded and led the Meta-Perception group at the Ishikawa-Oku Laboratory, University of Tokyo – a research group specialized on interfaces for expanding the vocabulary of HCI and media arts. He is presently Associate Professor and co-founder of the XRL/AM (Extended Reality Lab, Augmented Materiality Group) at the School of Creative Media in Hong Kong. Awards includes the Grand Prize [Art Division] (9th Japan Media Art Festival), Excellence Prize [Entertainment Division] (13th Japan Media Art Festival), Honorary Mention (Ars Electronica), NISSAN Innovative Award (2010), Jury Grand Prize at Laval Virtual (2011) among others. alvarocassinelli.com

Panel Coordinator:

Sophie Zhang Yujia (HK): Sophie Zhang Yujia is a PhD candidate in School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Her current research interests focus on building public self within the art world, and she is also involved with social media studies, image analysis, facial expression detections and emotion studies. Contributing to her research, Zhang does art practices on relative topics, and her artworks have been exhibited in Hong Kong for several times.

Panel Assistant:

Charlie Yip (HK): Charlie Yip obtained her Master Degree in Creative Media from the City University of Hong Kong after completing a Bachelor of Fine Art. Currently a member of the Neuro-Design Lab. Alongside the team members, she has been organizing various curatorial projects and creating interactive artworks. Her research focuses mainly on Curating Art and Media.

Credits

Curator: Ann Mak
Chair: Maurice Benayoun
Panel Coordinator: Sophie Zhang Yujia
Panel Assistant: Charlie Yip