SPECIAL EVENT

SUPER-TRAJECTORY: Life in Motion

SUPER–TRAJECTORY: Life in Motion is a presentation of new media artworks from Taiwan and Singapore that reflects on the human experience in an era of instantaneity, transformation and conflict, where speed is the new scale.

Through a programme of installations and screenings, artists investigate the artistic and cultural consequences of new technologies, reflecting on what it means to be making art in an accelerating, media-influenced world.

The artists, in different ways, explore a digital world that generates itself and our longing for material qualities and tactile connections in our lives. We see Chih-Ming Fan, Ong Kian Peng and Syntfarm employ computational algorithms as interventions to the present moment as we are confronted with new realities; while Debbie Ding, Charles Lim and Weixin Quek Chong engage with the intimacy and agency of touch in an exploration of materiality and physicality in our relationships with technologies. In the works of Cecile Chagnaud, Hsin-Jen Wang, Mangkhut (Jeremy Sharma) and Tsan-Cheng Wu, we encounter a delicate exchange with the artists’ worlds as they consider the notion of home and memory by mapping their personal experiences against the unprecedented impact of urbanisation.

Between today’s postdigital condition and the complex yet banal realities of contemporary life, this group of works poses the question: What are the humanistic values and principles in an increasingly formatted world?

SUPER–TRAJECTORY: Life in Motion at ArtScience Museum is a collaboration with INTER–MISSION (Urich Lau and Teow Yue Han), tamtamART (Vicky Yun-Ting Hung, Wei-Ming Ho and Lois Wen-Chi Wang) and Tainan Art Museum. Participating artists include Cecile Chagnaud, Debbie Ding, Chih-Ming Fan, Charles Lim, Ong Kian Peng, Weixin Quek Chong, Mangkhut (Jeremy Sharma), Syntfarm (Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic), Hsin-Jen Wang and Tsan-Cheng Wu.

The first iteration of SUPER–TRAJECTORY, Media/Life Out of Balance (6 October 2019 to 3 March 2020), was presented at Tainan Art Museum, setting out this cross-regional platform for contemporary and experimental media art and exchange in discourses on technology in art.

This drop-in session is a part of

ArtScience in Focus

Our series of ArtScience in Focus feature collaborations with education, art, science and technology partners to facilitating the exchange of ideas.

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The Artists

Ceclie Chagnaud

Cecile Chagnaud is a French visual and sound artist currently based in Singapore where she teaches post-production. Cecile works with film, video, photos and sound, connecting her love for primitive cinema with today’s numeric technologies.
Debbie Ding

Debbie Ding is a Singaporean visual artist and technologist who researches and explores technologies of perception through personal investigations and experimentation. She uses prototyping as a conceptual strategy for artistic production, iteratively exploring potential dead-ends and breakthroughs — in the pursuit of knowledge.
Chih-Ming Fan

Chih-Ming Fan is a Taiwanese artist and designer who works in audio-visual projects and video installations. His video works extend from realistic images to virtual image creation. He has exhibited in PLATINE, Temps D'Images, (CON)TEMPORARY OSMOSIS — Audiovisual Media festival 2015 and Hors Pistes Tokyo.
Charles Lim

Charles Lim is a Singaporean artist whose practice stems from an intimate, bodily engagement with the natural world, mediated and informed by field research and experimentation, performance, drawing, photography and video. In 2015, he represented Singapore at the 56th Venice Biennale.
Mangkhut (Jeremy Sharma)

Jeremy Sharma often conflates different mediums and disciplines together to form ambiguous forms and unstable statuses of objects. His work frequently deals with the ontology of things and the capacity for voids to be made, occupied, heard or visualised. Jeremy works and lives in Singapore.
Ong Kian Peng

Ong Kian Peng is a Singaporean media artist. He is interested in nature, sound and our perceptual apparatus; often resulting in works with that employs a combination of sound, digital media and kinetic forms. Kian Peng was awarded the President's Young Grand Prize in 2015. He also runs Supernormal.space.
Weixin Quek Chong

Weixin Quek Chong is a Singaporean visual artist whose practice explores materiality, the afterlives of images and the relationships between the digital, organic, and aesthetic. The effects and methods of translating images across materials are core to her practice. She was awarded the President’s Young Talents 2018 Grand Prize.
Syntfarm (Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic)

Andreas Schlegel works across disciplines and creates artifacts, tools and interfaces where art meets technology in a curious way. His practice is concerned with emerging and open source technologies where outcomes are driven by computation, interaction and networked systems.

Vladimir Todorovic is an artist and educator working with new technologies for immersive and generative storytelling. His projects have won several awards and have been showcased at various festivals, exhibitions, museums and galleries.
Hsin-Jen Wang

Hsin-Jen Wang, a.k.a. Aluan Wang, is a Taiwanese artist who specialises in media art utilising open source software, and is known for his laptop-based audiovisual performances. Since 2010, he has been deeply involved in OpenLab Taipei — a hackerspace that promotes the maker spirit and open source software.
Tsan-Cheng Wu

Tsan-Cheng Wu is a Taiwanese artist who focuses on sound and video creation. For the last ten years, he has contemplated sound and experimented with its possibilities. He started Taiwan Sound Map Project in 2011, and intends to finish it by 2021.

Gallery

Cecile Chagnaud, Swan (2020)

An allegoric fantasy about climate change, following a teenager as he drifts in and out of sleep on a train journey through the Swiss Alps that is dreamlike and magical, odd and confusing.
Debbie Ding, Automatic Sketches (2020)

The artist has designed a process of dialogue with the machine to produce art. The sketches on display question which one represents the purest representation of the initial visual idea.
Chih-Ming Fan, In the Fog – The Abandoned City (2016)

Created through a game engine system, the virtual imagery of a post-war island in this work points to the pervasiveness of digital culture in contemporary society and volatility that is inherent in systems.
Charles Lim, One Day I Forgot and Used My Hands (2010)

An experimental method of creating images in an intimate, experiential manner, with the artist using a camera by replacing the lens with his hands, blocking everything but a small gap.
Mangkhut (Jeremy Sharma), Instagrams of A Revolution (2019)

Made on a DIY synthesiser during a residency in Rajasthan, the artist wanted to create something urgent and dissonant to reflect turbulent emotions to events that are happening in the world.
Ong Kian Peng, Rescue Operation(s) (2019)

Generated through an AI bot that whimsically decides what makes sense, this fictionalised account of the state of climate change responds to the absurdity of politics related to this issue.
Weixin Quek Chong, eating cake (2018), footbound (2019)

Both works explore the synesthetic quality of moving image and sound, where the sensations and sound of hands tearing into cake and feet moving on latex are experienced through digital media.
Syntfarm (Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic), Formations (2011)

A short film created with the use of software code, inviting the viewer to play the role of an astronaut and travel through real data satellite imagery and synthetic cloud formations.
Hsin-Jen Wang, Paths to the Past (2018), Paths to the Future (2019)

The two works offer an experience based on the artist’s personal account of home, examining the concept of memory and geopolitics of identity from the perspective of computer coding.
Tsan-Cheng Wu, Wanderer 002 (2020)

The artist recuts and stitches audio-visual portraits of urban Taipei, inviting viewers to wander through these fragments to contemplate how we shape our cities and then they shape us.