Art & Technology #20: Fragments of perception through pondering on the future

The motif of this work, Hindenburg, is the largest airship in history and was the fruit of human technology, intelligence, and dream. This huge airship with a length of 245m, exploded and crashed above the U.S. in 1937. One of reporters who witnessed this tragedy raved, saying “Oh, the humanity!” After the modern era, the development of capitalism, science, and technology was formed with the aim of the development and imagination of Utopia; however, modernism’s goal of Utopia and the methodology as well as the current of grand narratives ended due to the World Wars like the crash of Hindenburg.
Lee Bul recomposed <Aubade III> as the architectural environment in the exhibition space. Spiral structure and transparent apparatus, and vinyl surfaces seeming like glass walls remind us of an exposition in the modernism era. The exposition was the space where the ultimate reflection of the hope and desire of the future were concentrated in during the modern period; however, Cockatoo Island where the work is installed is site-specific ruins. She embodied the historicity by superposing two historical layers—one is the image of the future that Modernism dreamt of, and the other is the ruin’s of the past.

<The Raining Bed>(2013) by FX Harsono reminds of a night in Asia which is often featured in movie scenes. It rains over neon signs while the mist covers our sight as well as many happenings that occur in the dark city over night. This kind of city atmosphere, often captured in many SF movies like <Blade Runner>, reveals the image of the society as dystopia rather than utopia. For this biennale, the artist who mainly deals with the subject matter of minority of Indonesia taking in the opposite position of its historical and political development, presents the work composed of a Chinese bed, rain over it, and the LED panels behind it. The bed means Peranakan, Indonesian Chinese. Peranakan is the word referring to the children between Indonesian and Chinese, who moved into Indonesia, symbolizing the multi-culture with various cultural environments. There is a sentence flowing on the LED panels. This short poem “Running rainwater washes the history away” points out many situations and historical context of south-east Asia and Oceania that have been forgotten or disappearing.

Exceeding restrictions of space across the virtual and the real, media art based on technology and science discuss about multicultural environments. On the other hand, as technology and media environments have pervaded daily life and been generalized, the awareness and expressions of them have spread over the general art world. ‘Biennale of Sydney’ is one instance that reveals this phenomenon. The artistic director, Rosenthal, begins with the composition of the virtual and the real and applies main keywords to the composition of the biennale, which are frequently discussed in existing media art, such as human beings and machines, nature and science, and the real and the virtual. ■ with ARTINPOST