In the past three weeks over 100,000 visitors have flocked to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for the Vivienne Westwood fashion exhibition, creating long queues and an overwhelming feeling of excitement inside its sparse modernist-style interior spaces.
However, for those of you wanting a deeper involvement with art, rather than an experience akin to browsing chic department store windows, then the B!AS International Sound Art Exhibition is for you.
What exactly is sound art? Is it music? Is it installation art? As one of the exhibiting artists Christina Kubisch said, sound art begins with people such as avant-garde composers John Cage and Pauline Olivieros. Contemporary media artists Wang Jun-Jieh (
PHOTO COURTESY OF TFAM
Besides never-before-seen classic pieces of sound installation and audio-visuals, there are works selected by an international sound art competition sponsored by the Yageo Foundation. Some of the works are interactive such as Marc Behren's Tokyo Circle, in which the weight of your footsteps controls the sounds that are emitted from the circular platform.
Kubisch said that not only is sound art time-based, meaning that you need time to experience and to listen to each of the works, but that you see things differently when you listen with attention.
Her electro-magnetic installation
Bird Tree consists of a flowing pattern of green wires drawn on the wall. Donning headphones, you can then pick up the sounds of various birds and nature sounds that tend to get louder the closer you get to the wall. The work makes the viewer become a participant in that it is necessary to walk around to pick up all the sounds that are emitted.
Paul DeMarinis' Fireflies Alight on the Abacus of Al-Farabi is a sound/laser installation in which the sound waves make small loops of wire flutter in the light of a green laser. The installation lets you see the sound of waves, rather than just listen to them.
In one darkened room, several projections correspond with various sound pieces that range in feeling from techno to the esoteric. The room is absolutely quiet, as one must wear individual headphones to hear the work.
One of the highlights of the show was the opening performance by the campy Japanese group Maywa Denki (
The YAGEO Sound Art Prize winning works are included in the exhibition and are notable for being the works of up and coming local artists.
First prize went to Hong Kongs' Anson, Hoi Shan Mak (
What: B!AS International Sound Art Exhibition
Where: Taipei Fine Arts Museum,181, Zhongshan North Road, Section 3, Taipei (台北市中山北路3段181號)
Telephone: (02) 2595 7656
When: Until Nov. 20
Buffeted by earthquakes and the potential of conflict with China, Taiwan’s leaders want to accelerate plans to make the island more resilient to communications breakdowns and direct attacks on its digital infrastructure. It could be an impossible task. Audrey Tang (唐鳳), the head of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, says she wants the country’s US$740 billion economy to be able to handle the possible collapse of all its communications in the event of an emergency by the end of next year. The threat isn’t theoretical: the Matsu Islands found themselves digitally adrift after two of their submarine internet cables were severed by boats
A while back, I came up with a ratio to determine whether it’s worthwhile to visit a particular location, what I call the transit-to-travel ratio. It’s simple: at a minimum, only one-tenth of the time should be spent in transit — car, bus, plane, train. A 20-minute MRT ride to Taipei’s Elephant Mountain, for example, and then a four-hour hike on the Taipei Grand Trail, counts as “making the ratio.” A High Speed Rail trip down to Kaohsiung and back and then several hours driving to and from the base of Jade Mountain to hike for one day is the
A fine-grained opinion piece in United Daily News (UDN) in December was packed with data that tells the story of the coming voter shifts in this election. The piece cited another UDN poll from early last year that surveyed residents of the six municipalities. The overall data identified four areas of major concern: housing prices (named by 50.6 percent), low salaries and insufficient career opportunities (32.2 percent), transportation problems (26.5 percent) and air pollution (25.1 percent). The next more important issue was public order at 10.1 percent. None of these issues have become a signature issue for any of the presidential
When Theresa MacPhail was four, her brother was killed in an accident. When she was 14, her mother died in a car crash. And when she was 24, her father died from anaphylactic shock after a bee flew in through the open window of his truck and stung him in the neck. For anyone else, these devastating experiences would almost certainly have been psychologically catastrophic. “I have several friends who are psychology professors, and they’re always saying, ‘No offense but, by rights, you should be a drug addict, or have severe emotional issues,’” she says, smiling, over Zoom from her
RSS