A world of electronic streams

When I was a senior in college in the fall of 1992, I had the opportunity to sit and watch a two hour session of the first college class ever conducted between continents through fiber optic cables. It connected a group of students in Williamstown, Massachusetts to another group in Helsinki, Finland. They spoke to each other through cameras, microphones, speakers and television monitors because it was the future of interaction and it would change perceptions of the world.

This was just over a decade ago, and I wasn't even using email yet. Philosophy was mired in deconstruction and thinking about media was relatively immature. Since then awareness has shifted and thinkers from many fields have spent a lot of effort trying to describe media, networks, and new computer driven sciences. As that process continues, the picture of the world is changing. If you want to see how, go to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) for Streams of Encounter electronic media based artworks, an exhibition curated by Andreas Walther and on display through March 23.

Streams involves 20 works by 21 artists from Germany and Taiwan and presents a tight, coherent statement about how media -- here defined narrowly as the cybernetic eyes and ears of photographic, sound, film and video recordings -- is changing our perceptions. It does so by pushing things to a logical extreme. It asks the question: What if all of our perceptions were filtered through media?

Walther has flooded the museum's basement with media streams -- the artworks -- and a viewer strolls through, randomly encountering the streams much as he or she would encounter the ads, pop songs and video flashes of everyday life. But the artworks are different from commercial media. They're not attention competitive; they're recordings of mundane experience. Some sit distant like landscapes: Egbert Mittelstadt shows you a Tokyo subway train; Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer take you on a drive through an obscenely perfected suburb; Wang Chun-jen (王浚人) lets you gaze across the Tamshui River at night where, of course, nothing happens. But other works engage you as an invisible witness. Anna Anders puts you in the crossfire of a crossbow range, with shooters in video monitors on one side of you and targets in monitors on the other, while speakers let you hear the invisible whizzing bolts that should be passing through your body. And Deitlin Rott puts you in the middle of an event, images from two facing screens that must be supplemented with your own thought for you to understand what's happened.

I wouldn't say all these works are extraordinary in themselves, but I would say that they work extremely well together. Overall they set the viewer, who in a way fills the role of the exhibition's self, gazing out at the world through the artificial windows of screens and speakers. What the viewer sees is a landscape that's neither natural nor urban, but merely an environment. Beyond that, it tends to be monotone, redundant and full of incomprehensible patterns, like distant flocks of birds swarming or the swirls of water evaporating from the top of a hotplate -- videos by Chen Yung-hsien (陳永賢) and Toni Mestrovic respectively. And ultimately it is isolating and unhuman, possessing some beauty but devoid of emotional attachment or human warmth. Because in a world where you are always behind screens, you are always an anonymous and distant viewer: a voyeur.