The Archivist Speaks ... [5]
From the 26th of July until August 16th the exhibition Translife – Media Art China 2011 is on view in Beijing, featuring several V2_related works. Here we go through the archive, looking for the connections between this exhibition and V2_.
sreenshot Translife website
The exhibition in Beijing features works by two Rotterdam based artists with whom V2_ has collaborated on numoruous occasions. Edwin van der Heide shows one of his most recent works Evolving Spark Network, and Marnix de Nijs is present with 15 minutes of Biometric Fame. The installation Oil Compass by Kasia Molga was produced in connection with Cesar Harada’s Protei project, co-produced by V2_ this summer. And Bernie Lubell, who had a major exhibition in 2009, is presented in Bejing with Aphasiogram.
Both Evolving Space Network and 15 Minutes of Biometric Fame are in the "Sensorium of the Extraordinary" part of the exhibition. Here we find also the installation Just Noticable Difference by Chris Salter – who in 2011 organised the expert meeting on vitalism at V2_, The Vibrancy Effect.
But there are more links to be made, in the first place to works shown in the exhibitions of the various Dutch Electronic Art Festivals. For instance, one of the most impressive works in the exhibition of the 2004 edition, DEAF04 - Affective Turbulence was Gravicells by Seiko Mikami and Sota Ichikawa. At the time this was a very technologically advanced work – imagine making a large scale environment using GPS in 2004. It is shown again in Bejing, in the 2005 version, as part of the "Sensorium of the Extraordinary".
There are two much earlier works by Seiko Mikami which, judging by the description, would have fitted in the "Sensorium of the Extraordinary" perfectly well. In 1998 V2_ showed Mikami's World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body as part of the DEAF98 Exhibition. A longer description of the work can be found in the publication The Art of the Accident (1998), and there is also an essay in the archive by Sabu Kosho: On Seiko Mikami's "World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body".
Even earlier, in 1996, the DEAF96 Exhibition of interactive artworks featured Seiko Mikami's Molecular Informatics, an installation and virtual world in which the mostly uncontrolled and unconscious eye movements of visitors "are converted into data and transformed into forms and structures in a virtual molecular world". That was certainly a sensorium of the extraordinary.
To really get into the context of DEAF96 – that's 15 years ago now – you can download and browse hi-res scans of the DEAF96 Program Booklet and the DEAF 96 Digital Territories Reader from the archive.
More on the exhibition in the NAMOC, Bejing: http://mediartchina.org
