As part of efforts to promote the digital arts, the Ministry of Culture has teamed up with the Quanta Arts Foundation to organize the 2012 Digital Performing Arts Festival in Taiwan.
Scheduled to open on Sept. 29, the annual event features a series of forums and performance art by artists and art groups from Taiwan, France, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and the UK.
Quanta Computer chairman Barry Lam (林百里), who founded the Quanta Arts Foundation in 2010, said that digital technology has had an enormous impact on human behavior and plays an important role in shaping the development of civilization.
“As a collector of paintings, I have learned that new inventions always change the face of arts. For example, the invention of photography is linked to the birth of the impressionist movement,” Lam said. “We are very fortunate to live in an era of digital art and witness pioneers venturing into the new territory.”
As part of the ministry’s flagship program to foster an environment for combining technology with performance art, the festival aims to not only bring in select productions from abroad, but also to encourage creations by local artists, the foundation’s executive director Yang Chung-heng (楊忠衡) said.
“We [the foundation] also want to participate in artistic creation, using resources from our technology company,” Yang said. “Quanta has put together a group of engineers exploring the possibilities of using cloud-computing technology in creating art. We are hoping to have a number of productions employing cloud services at the festival next year.”
Among this year’s lineup of six performances, TranSonic 2012 features sound artists from France, Germany, Japan and Taiwan performing live shows that fuse sounds, images and installations featuring interactive devices. Participating artists include fast-rising new-media artist Wang Chung-kun (王仲?) and Wang Fu-jui (王福瑞), an artist, educator and the country’s foremost proponent of sound art.
Emptied Space is a collaboration between theater director Chou Tung-yen (周東彥) and choreographer Chou Shu-yi (周書毅), which employs sensors, kinetic machines and panoramic photography to create a dance piece looking into the subjects of memory and consciousness.
In the realm of theater, KellerMan by Imitating the Dog, a theater troupe from the UK, blurs the boundary between cinema and theater by combining film, animation and live action to tell a murder story, festival programmer Liu I-ju (劉怡汝) said.
To Wang Jun-jieh (王俊傑), chief director of the Center for Art and Technology at the Taipei National University of the Arts, digital art means using technology as a medium for new, creative thinking.
“Digital art has completely penetrated our daily life. Today’s artists can create art on the Internet, mobile phones or iPads,” Wang Jun-jieh said. “By integrating technology with the arts, we create a new form of art based on entirely new thinking about and perspectives on art.”
The six-weekend-long festival is to take place at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (松山文創園區) in Taipei, as well as Kaohsiung’s Da-Dong Cultural Center (大東文化藝術中心) and Pier 2 Arts Center (高雄駁二藝術特區).
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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