The promise of technology versus the threat of technology is a conversation that has long been underway. Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab’s (C-LAB) annual Future Media Arts Festival focuses this discussion around the future through media art. Twenty-four works by 23 individual and group artists from Taiwan and abroad are currently on view both online or in-person through November 28.
Organized by Taiwan Living Arts Foundation, C-LAB Future Media Arts Festival features an eclectic mix of exhibitions carefully crafted to allow attendees to experience this future technology through audiovisual media, installations, theater, performances, lectures, and seminars. Several of the installations explore technology’s present, past, and future. The Festival’s online platform debuts in “Unzip C-LAB.” Using interaction through its exhibits and events, C-LAB invites viewers to explore and contemplate our relationship to technology. It also offers its global audience hands-on practice by means of workshops, lectures, and forums to demystify the coding that makes it.
In Sugar Foot, an animated video from American experimental rock group, Battles, Transformer-style robots from present-day Earth band together to fight Covid-19. When it looks as if the battle is lost, Earth transforms to unleash its secret musical weapon to destroy the virus and win the day. NFTs and NFT trading undergo a closer look in TFN-Technological Finding Netbot. This production, co-produced with Hong Kong–based Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, investigates the effects of decentralization and antiauthoritarian control of blockchain and digital currencies on our economies.
Artificial intelligence is also at play in many festival offerings. In Big Dada: Public Faces, American artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe create deep fake using AI-synthesized celebrities to spread misinformation. AI and real-time imaging transform winding rivers on Earth’s surface into beautiful sound and visual installations in German-based onformative’s work, Meandering River. Taiwanese artist Huang Yu-Hsiung also uses machine learning to transform sounds and trajectories into mesmerizing images, while American artist Kiel D. Mutschelknaus creates the ultimate collage of interactivity and design in Space Type Generator.
C-LAB was initiated in 2018 by the Taiwan Living Arts Foundation with a mission to provide an open and inclusive cultural landscape to promote innovation, experimentation, and international exchange. The physical site was once a military base and, before that, a research institute that was taken back after the Japanese colonial era ended. It has since transformed into a hub of art, tech, science, and music collaboration. There, you’ll find a contemporary art platform, a technology media platform, a sound lab, a social innovation lab, and research laboratories for high-performance computing, with many more facilities to come.
Among the innovations in the lineup is “Future Vision Lab,” which runs parallel to the festival; it features The Dome, a hemispherical experiential space for immersive audio performances and projections. Presentations there will include one lecture and fourteen performances of open calls, invited and self-produced art, music, hand-drawn animation, and theater programs. Four experimental works from Arts and Technology: Creative Innovation and Counseling Project will also screen during the Festival to showcase Taiwanese creative energy in audiovisual, installation, theater, and art activism.