Concept

During the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the National Art Museum of China presents “SYNTHETIC TIMES – Media Art China 2008” in its current location at the center of Beijing. NAMOC is the only national art museum in China that is dedicated to research, presentation and promotion of modern and contemporary arts. “SYNTHETIC TIMES – Media Art China 2008”, scheduled from June 10th to July 3rd, will be one of the most important cultural events leading up to the Olympic Games in Beijing.

The exhibition occupies approximately 4500 square meters (48000 square feet) of the museum gallery space and an additional outdoor area of ca. 2000 square meters (22000 square feet). The internationally recognized Dutch architecture firm NOX/Lars Spuybroek architecturally transform the entire first floor of the museum in response to the nature of the works on display. A full-color catalogue is co-published by NAMOC and the MIT Press with international distribution. An online forum dedicated to the discourse of the respective exhibition themes and beyond is created prior to the opening of the event. A pre-Exhibition symposium was held in New York City in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, Parsons the New School for Design and EYEBEAM in April 2008. Several satellite exhibition venues have been planned within the greater Beijing art community. In addition, a number of special evening events during the opening days of the Exhibition are conceived to celebrate the diversity of digital arts.

To complement the theme exhibitions, The Museum of Modern Art will contribute a special screening program consisting of seminal video art works. Ars Electronica will present the award winning Animation Festival while European Media Art Festival will bring in an edition of International Emerging Video Art. The Exhibition is envisaged as a landmark event in the history of contemporary Chinese art, dedicated to embracing the most innovative artistic production and theorization to date, and aspiring to foster and advance new modes of thinking and novel ways of artistic engagement, reflecting and critiquing an increasingly technologically immersed society and global cultural landscape.

Exhibition concept

Synthetic Times attempts to identify issues that characarize contemporary experiences deeply influenced and augmented by the ubiquitous computing technologies. It seeks to, under the technological construct of space and time, raise questions about the relationship between human and its extended self, its relationship towards the digitally enabled instruments and environments, its perception about the empirical world and its relationship with the society at large.

Works in the exhibition explore the trajectory of unruly visions from the desire to transcend the corporal to the construction of synthetic worlds, from telematic dreaming to transgenic hybrids, challenging the very notion of what we know as reality and what is perceived as being human.

The exhibition is organized around four distinctive yet interrelated themes.

  • “Beyond Body” aims to delineate the multiple routes of artistic endeavors in extending the physical body, raising questions of subjectivity and the norms of ethical codes. This exhibition component brings to focus the most current conception of cyberspace, transgenic illusion and the bio-electro afterlife and other fantasticals.
  • “Emotive Digital” examines the multitudes of digital life, where machines and devices become responsive creatures. Interactivity is not merely a simple give-and-take calculated procedure, but is imbued with sensitivities that invigorate emotional and reciprocal exchanges. It suggests a new symbiotic territory that awaits our close attention, for better or for worse.
  • “Recombinant Reality” poses questions of epistemological urgency in which a Cartesian world view no longer ensures comfort, and syllogistic reasoning finds no suitable dwelling. The notion of space not only is a pure production, but also a transient fluidity that oscillates between the familiar and the estranged. This exhibition component identifies multiple directions in which mixed reality, virtual reality and acoustic environments reveal new types of reality that reshape our notion of existence.
  • The internet has mutated into a pervasive, all-encompassing membrane of connected machines that operate on a planetary scale. It is the network that bears the sign of the times, it is “Here, There and Everywhere”. This section includes works that take the network as a departure of inquiry, into the disputed realms of public and private, and the quixotic journey of cyberspace.

Zhang Ga
Artistic Director / Curator