A child zips into Room 103 of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA, 台北當代藝術館), completely oblivious of the sign reading “high voltage,” and lunges at Scottie Huang Chih-chih’s (黃致傑) Motivational Sense Organism (動覺生物), an installation that uses lights and plastic flowers fused to small latticed booms with faux fern leaves, which elevate when a museumgoer approaches. After a scolding from a museum employee, the boy slowly reaches his hand out towards one of the fronds in an attempt to manipulate the sensors inside. The leaf moves but the boy loses interest and darts out, causing the frond to slump. The process is repeated as other children, parents in tow, enter the gallery.
Huang’s piece is part of the 3rd Digital Art Festival Taipei 2008, a collection of more than 40 interactive installations, Internet artworks, computer animations and digital games that runs until Nov. 9. The festival’s title, - Trans -, which is short for “transcending space and time,” seems somewhat misleading, because many of the works on display focus on the interaction between people and art. In this exhibit, humans take the place of interfaces such as keyboards that are used to manipulate machines and input data. In other words, the nifty gizmos-cum-art seek to make the viewer an active participant, rather than a passive viewer.
Some of the interactive installations use the bodies of museumgoers to create light, movement or sound, or a combination of all three. South Korean artist Mok Jin-yo’s sound-and-light installation, SoniColumn, can be played by touch. Like pressing the keys of a piano, passing one’s hand over one of the piece’s hundreds of LED light nodes causes a sound to be emitted.
Sixteen tubes hang from the gallery’s ceiling for Southern Wave 2: Concealment Space, a joint creation by Tainan University of the Arts Music Department and Logico-Studio (朗機工). Inside the tubes are spinning columns, each of which contains nodes of light bulbs. Speaking or singing into a microphone activates a sensor, creating a symphony of light. On a visit last Sunday, one woman broke into song, as if she were in a KTV, drawing cheers from a crowd of spectators.
Although many of the computer programs in the festival seem more like resume fodder for young engineers and artists (Single Cylinder, for example, looks like your average motorcycle racing video game, though it uses brands of scooters found in Taiwan), some come with a message, such as Regenerator, a video game that draws children’s attention to problems of environmental destruction, war and disease.
Many of the videos and animations require more of an attention span to digest. Chu Shu-shyan’s (朱書賢) four-minute animated video Dark Seed. Sprouting (黑色種子.抽芽) is a masterpiece of understatement, with a young man and a vagabond sitting on a bench, each smoking a cigarette. The minimalist narrative structure evokes Samuel Beckett’s later works and, somewhat paradoxically, its digital images are reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto. I watched the short three times; each viewing revealed something completely different, like a text that can be read and reread for different layers of meaning. Chu’s piece is located in a room with five other digitally generated shorts, which range from four to eight minutes in length and are all worthy of viewing. The museum has provided benches from which to watch the shorts.
Walking into MOCA this past Sunday afternoon, I was shocked to encounter something I’d never seen before at the museum: a long line. It was comprised overwhelmingly of families and young couples, who waited as long as half an hour to enter the museum so they could ponder, examine, watch and fiddle with the installations, videos and other art on display. Though some might find a deeper meaning underlying these ultra-modern gadgets, it seems that, above all, they are meant to be played with, rather than admired or contemplated. Traditionalists may scoff at the concept, but the kids seem to love it.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and