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Framed : Wormhole Taiwanese-Swiss collaborative exhibition

Introduction

How do web-based creative practices relate across cultures and national borders?

KUNSTSURFER is a browser-based art space. It works as an ad-blocker extension that, instead of just hiding advertisements, replaces it with digital contemporary art. 
It thereby allows users to repurpose their web-based advertising spaces into an online curatorial platform. By integrating art into daily browsing, KUNSTSURFER questions and redefines art consumption online. It playfully takes over commercial space and engages with its aesthetics and strategies.
“Framed : Wormhole” is a cultural and professional exchange. It asks questions like: If we take culture to include our online activities and identities, how do their online and offline sides relate to each other? The results of the exchange are shown in “Framed : Wormhole” ,an exhibition with works by WEN Gum Gum, TUAN Mu, PENG Si Qi, HOU Ssu Chi, CHANG Ting Chen, LIN Yu Liang and Funnysandwich, curated by Kenneth Ting Yu LIN and Chiara Giardi with the KUNSTSURFER collective, taking place online on the KUNSTSURFER extension and in Wartsaal Wipkingen, Zurich (from June 10th) and in the Digital Art Center, Taipei (from June 11th). The artworks focus on different aspects of the relationship between online and offline worlds. 

Curator

Kenneth Ting Yu LIN           

Born in 1994 Pennsylvania, United States. His works focus on capturing the “floating nostalgia”. Referring to the current political situation and colonial history of Taiwan, instead of using clear political-symbols, he tries to use the flowing sensibility as a path, to present a non-directional nostalgia. Through a residence project in Greece in 2021, he started to collaborate as a curator.
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KUNSTSURFER Team

KUNSTSURFER is a browser-based art space. It works as an ad-blocker extension that, instead of just hiding advertisements, replaces it with digital contemporary art. It was created by Chiara Giardi, Dr. Heiko Schmid, Evita Verbrugge, Itay Blaish and Ugo Pecoraio and it participated in the 5th The Wrong Biennale. The conceptualisation and development of the add-on are financed by the city of Zurich (Creative Tech for Good).

Artist

LIN Yu Liang 

LIN Yu Liang, graduated from Taipei National University of the Arts, major in New Media Art. Mostly focusing on loop-video, placing several objects, symbols, a virtual interface, and text in a single image, and creating a narrative by motions within each other. Recently working on combining video concepts into space and installation. Trying to search the possibility of image, interface, and space, by the perspective of image projecting interface.

[Internet Residents_NPC]
3D Animation, Stereo, Loop
2022

[Internet Residents_NPC]  attempts to respond to the identity meaning of virtual avatars in various social media with the role-playing game career generation system, NPC interaction setting, event triggering, and other mechanisms.
By constructing virtual scenes and the characters generated by AI operations, think about these virtual faces appearing in the public’s field of vision in large numbers. Does their existence affect or construct their own social structure?

LIN Yu Liang Website
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HOU Ssu Chi

Born 1996 in Taipei, Taiwan. From the perspective of light, he explored the image and dialectically examined it. What’s more, the work also tries to operate the vision of the broadcast and the interface of machine. The light in reality is direct and clear. It is rational that reflects everything. HOU has a romantic interpretation of light. As a representative of “vision”, light allows people to read everything. And it makes people feel guided.Through HOU’s work, the viewer is also allowed to have a new interpretation of light.

Windows screens windows
Video Installation , Loop, 2022

With the 10 kinds of web page advertisement ratios that can be replaced on the KUNSTSURFER , compare the windows as screens, the back of the image and the outer frame of the screen are made visible through the glitch effect. Discuss the extent of image across different layer dimensions in the actual TV screen.

HOU Ssi Chi Website
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TUAN Mu

Born in 1994. Currently active in Taipei. Creative formats span across VR, video installation, and Oriental media. Earlier works were mainly ink wash painting on paper. More recently, TUAN has begun to reference the aesthetic and philosophical views of pan-East Asian culture, trying to interpret through alternative viewpoints mankind’s perceptive states within the experience of technology, including the subject-object experience in VR, and virtual experience of the body. In addition to personal creative context, TUAN has also ventured into curatorial and interdisciplinary creative projects since 2019.

Transformation of Things
VR installation, 3D Animation, Stereo, Loop, 2021

The “Transformation of Things” originates from Zhuangzi’s writing : the chapter The Adjustment of Controversies attempts to point out the dynamic relationship between subject and object, reality and illusion, a relationship as much opposed as united. This reveals how the world perceived by a subject is not the one and only truth of reality. Perceptions at times do possess the ability to help transcend borders between one’s own body and that of the world, they do hold the possibility of transforming oneself into an Object. As written at the end of the same text: “In this moment, did I dream of Zhuang Zhou changing into a butterfly? Or did I dream of a butterfly that changed into Zhuang Zhou?”

In virtual reality, the body is made to be connected to the inside of a virtual space. In that moment, perceptions gathered inside virtual reality will shape how the body senses its own presence. This part suspends the body situated in physical reality, it creates in it a vacancy; in turn, the sense of embodiment induced in virtual reality also shakes the idea of how the human body is as independent as indivisible. This means, the body no longer is purely physical, but re-deployed into the world after and through the experience of simulation. Under these circumstances, the subject restructures the limits of its own body through its virtual body, resulting in the subject overspilling the border, crossing towards the virtual, and the virtual too, crossing over towards the subject.

With virtual reality installations, Transformation of Things sets up a special system of observation. What the artwork attempts to express is not about the gradual immersion of a viewer’s perception, nor it is about the body’s presence. It is, through means of controlling the subject’s viewing position, about how we can reach situations in which the notion of presence is in continual transformation, to then call forth the “Transformation of Things”, this process experienced by the subject inside virtual space. The viewer begins as an observer outside the virtual object, then throughout an ongoing immersion inside the object, it goes on to observe the inner structure of the virtual item. At that moment, the viewer-subject belongs, on one hand, to the outside, as an observer examining the object; and on the other hand, because of how perceptions produce presence as, it also exists as an intrinsic part of the object. Conversely speaking, the virtual entity constituting the Object, continuously unfolds the inner part of its materiality to the observer; so that, when crossed by the observer, its interior inverts into its exterior, and becomes for the observer a space to exist in. In this system of observation, “subject/object”, “observer/observed”, “self/butterfly”, respectively come to point at their pair’s presence conditions, i.e. : “I am at once present inside and outside of the butterfly, the butterfly is at once present inside and outside of me.” Under these circumstances, the subject no longer exists inside virtual space in the form of another subject: for it was transformed and altered by a state of fundamental metamorphosis , it rather approaches virtual entity itself. Following how the subject’s position keeps on delving inside the object, it eventually passes from the outside in, through the material structure of the virtual object: texture, polygon mesh, armature, coordinates. Ultimately, the subject exhausts the virtual entity, the very visibility of its external materiality, and dives into the innermost part of it. Inside this space, materiality of the virtual entity is revoked, and by seeing the invisible object, the subject then faces the essence of the virtual entity.

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PENG Si Qi

Born in 1995 in Taoyuan, Taiwan, PENG Si Qi is inspired by the mounting and binding techniques for books and paintings as well as the craftsmanship of the East. Her works often take the forms of mixed media and space installations, involving familiar everyday objects hinting at the personal emotions and the ebb and flow of life. She aims to preserve both the light and the weight, the lost and the preserved, fiction and reality, drawing a path into the abyss of intimacy.

Leaf with white glaze, Shang Kai Ware, Taiwan 
Ceramic, Raw lacquer, Print on paper, Pine wood, glass
2022

A fabricated list of National Museum collections / dreams too good to be true?

Becoming the official collections of National Palace Museum is the obsession PENG Si Qi always inserts into her work. “When it comes to archiving my works, sculptures in particular, PENG often requested the images to be shot in a sense like it was part of National Palace Museum’s collection, with photo light evenly wrapped around them and subtle background gradients.” PENG said, “This allows me to day-dream that my works were well treated and were as valuable as thousand-year-old national antiquities.”

By participating in KUNSTSURFER art project, PENG smuggles her tiny wish online and further expands it into ambitious vow in the virtual world. At the analog show, Peng will be presenting a “collection catalog of National Palace Museum”, which contains PENG’s works named and categorized under the same system as National Palace Museum, along with composition mimicking the never-changing aesthetic of museum publications. For PENG, these “evidences” are just her first few steps towards composing her selfish rhapsody.   

PENG Si Qi Website

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CHANG Ting Chen 

Currently studying with a major in mixed-media, in the department of Fine Arts master’s program of Taipei National University of the Arts. CHANG’s art practice is based on personal life experience and the field of primary family. In addition to the study of photographic technique, it also regards the image medium as an object material and develops its plane and materiality, as well as the characteristics of reuse and construction of space.

For Example, For Santorini
Mixed-media interactive installation, Live streaming audio and video channels, 2022

I spent three months in Greece last autumn and winter, but never got to Santorini, the familiar blue-and-white island. The owner of the restaurant said to me with a bit of surprise and regret, “That’s a must-see place in Greece!” I think so too. That’s why the scenery of this restaurant attracted me!
I keep asking the owner, “Have you ever thought about living in Greece?” She said, “No, because the life there is too relaxed and it’s too far away from Taiwan. My family is here.” I think so too. Why leave the place that belongs to you forever just for temporary enjoyment?
– A conversation with the owner of a Greek restaurant in Taipei one day.
Nevertheless, I still miss Greece, especially the feeling of having my body right there. Fortunately, there are still many metaphors in life that can help me get closer to the other side of the world, to replace the sample in my heart.

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WEN Gum Gum

WEN uses the image as a tool for self-introspection and outlets, interweaving inner spirituality, the world, and the internet, with absurdity as an inevitable adornment to the process of making the work. She is concerned with the way in which mass media portrays characters, particularly in relation to the narrowing of gender roles.

Join the subtropical chapter romance?
Digital print, 91 x 61 cm, 2022

Join the subtropical chapter romance?
was seen as an attractive teaser of a fictional narration of love. WEN took the form of a series of mobile game advertisements that offer players important choices about the heroine’s life and relationships, the game takes a sarcastic tone and intense speeding with which decisions are made as an entertainment.
“I’m so fucking ugly today but all I have to do is dress up and make myself beautiful, then I may sit on a better dick to be a successful woman” quote from this type of game, some of that immorally take place in the storyline of historical narratives that were from the history of European palace to Qing Dynasty sex scandal dramas. The game also emphasizes the sexualization of female fecundity, such as “today she’d be a DJ, tomorrow she’s suddenly ignorantly (and clumsily) pregnant, becoming a single mother who has to prostitute for living”, players can make choices for a person as  manipulating an object, the success of the game it often leads by showing off the power of body and sex, due to limited choices, the consequences are predictable, female has been narrowing of gender roles.
WEN turned the quote “who will i be today?” into a neutral statement, trying to insert “a female president”as a kind of success into the narrative, viewers may wonder about Gum’s work and find the unusual inside it and what she expected… a feeling of poetic magic.

個人網站
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Funnysandwich

Funnysandwich is currently studying at the Institute of New Media Art, National Taipei University of the Arts. Specialized in programming animation and interactive installation, Funnysandwich hopes to make creations that fit this era the most by presenting his most authentic feeling of the present through his works, and in search of the trading connection between artist and the society.

Tamsui
Interactive 3D Animation, loop, 2022

Inspired by the “MRT Tamsui Line” that I take every day in Taipei, I created this work based on the scenery along the way and my own imagination. Convert the scenery of the real space in the impression to the cyberspace, and use the virtual language to rebuild a landscape. And in an interactive way, to break the “window” that can only be viewed in one direction, trying to change the scenery outside the window with one’s own consciousness.

Collaboration

Adviser
Taipei City Government

Organizer
KUNSTSURFER

Co-organizer
Digital Art Center, Taipei
Wartsaal Wipkingen

Sponsor
Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government
Zürcher hochschule der künste

2022.06.11~06.26

June 10th-15th – Wartsaal Wipkingen (Zurich)

June 11th-26th – Digital Art Center, Taipei

 

Venue

Digital Art Center, Taipei
No. 180, Fuhua Rd., Shilin Dist., Taipei City, Taiwan

Event

Opening & Guide Tour
06.11 Sat. 14:30

Artist talking
The presence and future possibilities of online exhibition
06.18 Sat. 16:00
speaker : KUNSTSURFER Team X CHEN Hsiang Wen X HSIAO Bo Chun X Kenneth Ting Yu LIN