Month: Tuesday July 24th, 2018

Author Published on

Chronus Art Center (CAC) in collaboration with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Nam June Paik Art Center co-present an international group exhibition series Datumsoria. The exhibition was inaugurated at CAC from September 17 to December 30, 2016, traveled to ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe subsequently between September 9, 2017 and March 18, 2018 and is currently on view at Nam June Paik Art Center, exhibiting artworks by LIU Xiaodong, Carsten Nicolai and Nam June Paik.

Meanwhile, “Three Rooms,” a project initiated by CAC, ZKM and Nam June Paik Art Center, supporting and promoting international exchange of emerging media artists, is now open at Nam June Paik Art Center, featuring three artists: YANG Jian (China), Verena Fridrich (Germany), and Kim Heecheon (Korea) who were selected by the three institutions. The Chinese selection was made through the exhibition A Nomination Exhibition of Three Rooms: International Touring Exhibition of Young Media Artists in 2017 at CAC.

Datumsoria and Three Rooms opened on July 12 and will remain on view  through September 16 at Nam June Paik Art Center.

 

 <The opening of Datumsoria & Three Rooms>

▲ LIU Xiaodong: Weight of Insomnia, commissioned by "Art&Tech@". Courtesy of Nam June Paik Art Center.

▲ LIU Xiaodong presenting his work. Courtesy of Nam June Paik Art Cente

▲Verena Friedrich: The Long Now. Courtesy of Nam June Paik Art Center

▲ YANG Jian: Forest of Sensors. Installation performance. Courtesy of Nam June Paik Art Center

 

 Past Exhibition 

Datumsoria @CAC

Datumsoria @ZKM 

A Nomination Exhibition of Three Rooms: International Touring Exhibition of Young Media Artists @CAC

 

Co-presented by 

 

 

 

Author Published on
 

Artists

Karolina Sobecka, Jamie Alle

Guests

ZHU Xinguang, WEI Ning, CHEN Huajin, QIN Siyan, Tega Brai

Language

English/Chinese

Date

July 22, 201

Time

11:00-17:00

Venue:

Chronus Art Center (BLDG. 18, No. 50 Moganshan Road, Putuo District, Shanghai

Supported by Pro Helvetia Shanghai and Swissnex Chin

Free Addmission

* Only 20 seats available, R.S.V.P

On July 22, Chronus Art Center(CAC) will organize a public workshop led by Karolina Sobecka, one of the participating artists of Machines Are Not Alone, in collaboration with Jamie Allen. It will examine how the general public might understand and interact with the carbon cycle in more explicit and perceivable ways, through media, technologies and social practices. The invited guests will share some of their research and practices in relation to the topic of enhancing carbon sink, etc., and will join in hands-on experiments and discussions with the audiences during the afternoon session

 

About Field Remediations: CARBON 

Field Remediations: CARBON is a set of activities, field-visits, experiments, mediations, documentations, and publications on the topic of carbon and the new machinic technologies of carbon remediation, capture, sequestration and storage. Conducted in Shanghai as part of the group exhibition Machines Are Not Alone at Chronus Art Center, the project samples the spectrum of the material practices, opportunities and challenges associated with the development of carbon capture technologies

Field Remediations: CARBON will populate a library installed at the exhibition with objects and materials collected in the Shanghai context that explore technological interactions with the carbon cycle. It will further produce media, documents and a manual, “Closing the CARBON Cycle,” for activities done in the exhibition space and through extended public programming with local partners in China

Field Re-mediations: CARBON looks at carbon sink enhancements known as ‘negative emissions technologies’ (NETS), which include direct air capture, enhanced weathering, ocean fertilization, and soil sequestration. Although much touted and worked on in technological and scientific communities, the sciences and processes of NETS are, to the general public, speculative and futuristic, and so misunderstood. Using the lens of ‘fieldwork’, we are seeking to visit, document and sample the localities, industries and realities of a burgeoning technical and industrial endeavors to capture and sequester waste carbon dioxide (CO2). The goal of our work is to align the science-fiction of carbon capture with the science-fact of its current research and implementations.

 

< Workshop schedule >

Morning Session

11:00

Introduction to Field Re-Mediations: CARBON Workshop

11:30

Group exercise: drawing the carbon cycle

11:45

Guest presentations

< Break >

Afternoon Session

13:00

Public discussion with the guests

13:45

Source/sink experimentation including mineralizing CO2 from human breath and demonstrating chemical weathering process with basalt

15:00

Discussion of “Closing the CARBON Cycle” sites

15:45

Fieldwork Development

What do we gather on field sites?

What are other sites possible?

What techniques shall we use to populate the new CARBON collection?

What sort of materials, openings and guidance should form part of the machine and activity manual “Closing the CARBON Cycle”?

17:00

Reception, discussion

 

About the Artists 

Karolina Sobecka is an artist working at the intersection of art, science and technology. Her projects investigate what drives technological innovation and shapes the philosophy that inscribes humans in nature. Sobecka's work has been shown internationally and has received numerous awards, including Creative Capital, Rhizome, NYFA, Princess Grace Foundation, Eyebeam, Queens Museum, Vida Art and Artificial Life Awards and Japan Media Festival. Sobecka founded the art and design studio Flightphase, has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, School of Visual Arts, University of Washington, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Aesthetic Practice and Theory, HGK FHNW Basel.

Jamie Allen has been an electronics engineer, a polymer chemist and an exhibition designer with the American Museum of Natural History. He experiments with the material systems of media, electricity, and information as artworks, events and writing. Allen is Senior Researcher at the Critical Media Lab in Basel. His Ph.D., under the supervision of Siegfried Zielinski and Avital Ronell, was awarded in 2015 (summa cum laude) by the European Graduate School. He is the co-founder of the media, art and philosophy journal continent. He is a Canada Research Chair in Infrastructure, Media & Communications.

Special thanks to Pro Helvetia Shanghai and the strategic support from Swissnex China

Author Published on

Machines Are Not Alone: A Machinic Trilogy

July 21 – October 21, 2018

Chronus Art Center (CAC)

BLDG.18, No.50 Moganshan RD., Shanghai

 

Curated by

ZHANG Ga

 

Artists

Tega Brain, DENG Yuejun, FENG Chen, GUO Cheng, HsienYu Cheng and Ting-Tong Chang, Tomás Saraceno, Karolina Sobecka (& Christopher Baker, Jamie Allen), Saša Spačal and Mirjan Švagelj, Gail Wight, ZHENG Da

 

Supported by

Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Australia Council for the Arts, Hong's Foundation for Education & Culture

 

Special Thanks

The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana - Department for Culture, Kapelica Gallery

 

Opening

Saturday, July 21, 2018

3.30 – 5 pm  Panel Discussion

5 - 7 pm  Opening Reception

 

On View

11 am – 6 pm Wednesdays – Sundays

Ticket:   ¥ 20 (Free admission on Wednesdays)

 

Chronus Art Center (CAC) is pleased to present the group exhibition Machines Are Not Alone: A Machinic Trilogy.

The world is machinic: not only does its function depend on a network of machines but also the land, river, mountains, trees and animals, humans included, are machines of some sort when seen from an operational point of view or an abstract sense of the word because they are systems of interconnected biospheres, neural synapses, motor-sensor coordinates, psychosomatic attributes, social relationships and technical milieus imbricated and intertwined, transversal and reciprocal as intricate as the relationship between humans and thoughts, knowledge and freedom. Far from a mechanistic vision of dualism, this worldview of machines, apparatuses and devices is one that envisages a unity which endorses giving everything its due place as equally significant and worthy of respect and care.

The exhibition Machines Are Not Alone shows that the machinic ecology is as mechanological as organological of the co-individuation of human organs, technical organs and social organization, therefore machines are not alone in that they all work, operate and function with other machines, whether of their phylum or of other orders. Machines Are Not Alone also implicitly unveils a simple but evident theorem that all that is interdependent can only be tended to as such, so that a symbiosis of Heideggerian fourfold of the Earth, Sky, Mortals and the Divinities may through machinic mediation, come to a true realization.

The exhibition is fitted with sky machines, earth machines, and many other geoengineering and emotive devices and apparatuses, moved by transportation machines and custom machines and activated by exhibition machines, workshop machines and audience and participation machines.

 

HsienYu Cheng and Ting-Tong Chang：Secondlife-Habitat, 2016 ©CAC, Courtesy Hong's Foundation for Education & Culture. Photo: ZHONG Han

 

Saša Spačal & Mirjan Švagelj: Meta_bolus, 2017 © Courtesy CAC, Kapelica Gallery. Photo: ZHONG Han

 

Gail Wight: Pool, 2017 © Courtesy the artist. Photo: ZHONG Han

 

Taiwanese artists HsienYu Cheng and Ting-Tong Chang create a bio-electronic device Secondlife-Habitat to play a humorous game of dilemmas with audiences that conveys their basic outlook —— life should not be “differentiated by proportion, scale, and form.” Another collaborative group, Slovenian artist Saša Spačal and scientist Mirjan Švagelj, hints on the disruption caused by human's inherent non-selective pharmacological spuriousness with their installation Meta_bolus by exposing two connected metabolic processes that take place in nature and the artificial extraction of antibiotics. In the video installation Pool, American media artist Gail Wight unveils the miniature worlds under the tide pools of Salt Point State Park in northern California. Chinese artists DENG Yuejun ignites the spokes-machine of his sound installation O that takes sunlight as part of the energetic actants, while media artist GUO Cheng plays with The (temporary) gadget to interact with the background radiation levels in the atmosphere. Tomás Saraceno showcases his participatory project Aerocene in White Sands (New Mexico, United States), a buoyant sculpture supported by collective intelligence and environmental factors that mobilizes the geographical boundary with a new infrastructure. Swiss-based artist Karolina Sobecka takes on the in-depth research of carbon circuit system and situates her collaborative project Picture Sky and Field Remediations: Carbon in the local community of Shanghai. The projects engender meaning and evoke significance in the process of working and making. In resonance with Sobecka's projects, Tega Brain brings her land-oriented project Deep Swamp to explore a sustainable way of living with the local wetland system. ZHENG Da's Physiological Responses II presents self-performance of the 270KG machines. Consisting of various electronic systems and 600 cooling fans, the installation takes on a conative suggestion that machines might have their inherent autonomy in the routine of mechanization. In the installation W, FENG Chen reconstructs the camera that has influentially altered the way we see and hear the world. The mechanic installation operates as a wedge exploring the interactions between one's perception machines and creativity machines.

 

DENG Yuejun: O, 2016 © Courtesy the artist. Photo: ZHONG Han

 

 

GUO Cheng: The (temporary) gadget, 2018 © Photo: CAO Daxu

 

Machines Are Not Alone further extends the notion of subjectivity into the realm of nonlife and the object world, both cultural and natural, technology and psychic, proposing a radical rethinking of modernity, freedom and emancipation in a posthuman symbiosis.

 

Tomás Saraceno: Aerocene in White Sands (NM, United States), 2015 ©CAC, Courtesy Aerocene Foundation. Photo: ZHONG Han

 

Karolina Sobecka & Christopher Baker: Picture Sky in Mexico City, 2015 © Courtesy the artist. Photo: ZHONG Han

 

Karolina Sobecka & Jamie Allen: Field Re-mediations: Carbon, 2018 © Courtesy the artist. Photo: ZHONG Han

 

Taga Brain: Deep Swamp, 2018 © Courtesy the artist. Photo: ZHONG Han

 

The exhibition starts its ignition at Chronus Art Center in Shanghai in the summer of 2018, continues to Zagreb Contemporary Art Museum in winter to become Device Art Triennial 2018, and finally lands at the Guangdong Museum of Art as a component of 6th Guangzhou Triennale. Each traveling iteration will root itself in the local milieu and create interconnections with its immediate surroundings and umwelt logistically, ecologically and psychosocially as if a living act of the Three Ecologies. Together the trilogy maps out a machinic trajectory that transverses oceans and lands, places and sites; integrates climates and communities and adapts limitations and expansions for a resounding machinic chorus.

 

ZHENG Da: Physiological Responses, 2016 © Courtesy the artist, Photo: ZHONG Han

 

FENG Chen: W, 2015 © Courtesy the artist. Photo: ZHONG Han

 

 

 

 

 

Author Published on

Artist
Karolina Sobecka

In collaboration with
Christopher Baker

Open to
100+ participants in Shanghai

Keywords
sky, atmosphere, cloud, satellite, picture

Dates
07.08.2018 1:19pm

Upload your captured 'sky' to
http://picturesky.net

Previous events
http://www.gravitytrap.com/artwork/picture-sky

Supported by Pro Helvetia Shanghai

 What is Picture Sky?


Picture Sky, Karolina Sobecka, 2015.

Picture Sky is a large-scale image creation tool that organizes crowds to simultaneously take photographs of the sky with their mobile phones. The resulting images form vast composite images of the sky only possible through the distributed power of the crowd. Observers position themselves at points of a geographical grid and take pictures of the sky at the same time that a satellite captures an image looking down. The premise of the project is to construct an image equal and opposite to the one taken by the satellite, by collecting together all of the observers’ pictures. The crowd-sourced image is an artifact of the experience of looking at the sky simultaneously, of seeing it together. It's a collective action that directs our attention to the atmosphere.

In resonance with the Chronus Art Center (CAC) summer exhibition Machines Are Not Alone, artist Karolina Sobecka brings the project to Shanghai and invites 100-plus participants to join us!


In the process of Picture Sky

 

How to accomplish an art project in the collective — Instructions：

 

Step 1/
Take out your phone and go to
http://picturesky.net

Step 2/

Type in your name. You will be credited as part of the project Picture Sky in the exhibition. 

Step 3/
The shooting time is at 1:19 pm on July 8, exactly the same time when a satellite flying over Shanghai. Please make sure the picture is taken at the same moment. There is a countdown timer on the website for your notice.

Step 4/
Please mark your location on the map before shooting.

Step 5/

Open the camera on your phone.

Step 6/

Facing the North (you can use the compass on phone).

Step 7/

Take a picture of the sky. Try to keep away from any blockage so the whole image could be covered only by the sky.

Step 8/

Go back to the website and upload the picture.

For video instructions, please visit http://chronusartcenter.org/en/picture-sky-invites-you-to-join/

 How To Sign Up？

 

Please scan the QR code below before 1:19 pm, July 8 to join the Picture Sky group on WeChat.

For your first message in the group, please share your name + occupation + location.

You are also welcomed to add CAC as friend on WeChat.
Search chronusartcenterorg and send a friend request. Please note "Picture Sky Sign Up".

If you have any question, please leave a comment below this article.

 

< Previous Events>

 

<About the Artists>

Karolina Sobecka is an artist working at the intersection of art, science in technology. Her projects investigate what drives technological innovation, and shapes the philosophy that inscribes humans in nature. Karolina’s work has been shown internationally and has received numerous awards, including from Creative Capital, Rhizome, NYFA, Princess Grace Foundation, Eyebeam, Queens Museum, Vida Art and Artificial Life Awards and Japan Media Arts Festival. Karolina founded art and design studio Flightphase, has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, School of Visual Arts, University of Washington, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She is a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Aesthetic Practice and Theory, HGK FHNW Basel.

Christopher Baker is an artist whose work engages the rich collection of social, technological and ideological networks present in the urban landscape. Christopher’s work has been presented at festivals, galleries and museums in the US and internationally in venues including, Laboral (Gijon, Spain), Museum of Communication (Bern, Switzerland), Casino Luxembourg – Forumd’art Contemporain (Luxembourg), Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina (Florence, Italy), as well as venues in France, Finland, Hungary, Denmark, Australia, the UK and Canada. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art and Technology Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

< About Exhibition Machines Are Not Alone >

In this summer, Chronus Art Center will present the group exhibition Machines Are Not Alone. Exposing machines as systems, networks, milieus, natures of many orders and cultures of different kinds, this exhibition will investigate and discuss the symbiosis and reciprocity between natural and cultural machines.

The exhibition will begin as a prologue to the Device Art Triennale 2018. It will launch at Chronus Art Center in Shanghai in the summer of 2018, and then continue to the Zagreb Contemporary Art Museum in the winter, finally culminates at the Guangzhou Museum of Art as a component of 6th Guangzhou Triennale. Each traveling iteration will situate itself in the local milieu and create interconnections with its immediate surroundings and umwelt.

 

Project supported by Pro Helvetia Shanghai