Arthub Favorite Week 23

How does science and technology influence our identities and self-awareness? With the recently launched second iteration of BLAST! open call and Arthub’s ongoing Screening Program, which will soon be shifting to a semimonthly schedule for the remainder of the calendar year – featuring artistic programs with Jennifer Wen Ma, Wang Yefeng, Ma Qiusha and more – it should be evident that we have developed a bit of an obsession with the 21st century’s slow, but inevitable digitization.

Our lives are driven, morphed, enhanced and influenced by those oh, so alluring incandescent screens surrounding us. In support of our fixation, Arthub would like to introduce a special upcoming event, Mediated Body and Embodied Technologies, hosted by CAC, Shanghai.

Mediated Body and Embodied Technologies

Curator and Convener: Bruce Bo Ding
Fork #1: Performance | Wake Up To Dream

Time:
Saturday, June 18, 2016 at 7:00 pm
Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 3:00 pm

Venue: Chronus Art Center (Building 18, No. 50 Moganshan Road, Shanghai)
Free admission, please RSVP here.

Crew:
Choreographer and Dancer: Anneliese Charek, Rachael Eliott
Interactive Designer: What’s Media Lab
Music Designer: Yu Xueqing
Dramaturge and Director: Bruce Bo Ding

Description

Everything you can imagine is real. – Pablo Picasso

Technology has always influenced the form and intensity of our experiences, while at the same time changing our ideas about the future. Such imaginative ideas include a sort of high-spirited progressivism, but also implies an ambivalence which could be partly attributed to the re-understanding of reality: from photoshopped selfies to AI lovers, from social personas to virtual identities, we have re-shaped reality and our relationship with it. When information loses its phsyicality and action is modulated by technologies, “virtual” has reclaimed its original meaning, that is the potential or force to develop into actual existence.

This work is a performative response to the current situation and a rehearsal of possible relations between the live modes of existence and generative representation. When sound, image, body and program are all “performers” and “agents” on the stage, we hope to create a new dream, a new reality.

And when we wake up, are we not facing yet another dream?

About Mediated Body and Embodied Technologies

M.B.E.T. is an open-source practice repository and research process addressing the various mechanisms and possibilities of human future mediated by technologies. First, started by reflecting and speculating on the relations between the enacted and the represented, as well as the virtual and the real (a contingent production rather than a natural inevitability), M.B.E.T. brings back embodiment into the picture to investigate if/how the forms/media of embodiment are relevant in the production of identity and subjectivity as well as the circulation and communication of information. In the spirit of open source, it tries to create a fluid and evolving space in which practitioners and researchers from different areas can come together and contribute in this creative exploration.

For more details about the event please click here.