● Artists: CHI Po Hao, ZHANG Meng Tai, Rosalie YU
● Curator: SHIH Ya Tien
● Designer: Caitlin LAI
● Production: Zone Sound Creative
● Date: 2021.01.15 – 2021.01.29
● Venue: Jinglü Gallery (No.124, Jinjiang St., Zhongzheng Dist., Taipei City 100, Taiwan)
● Exhibition Link: https://reurl.cc/jRn9xM
● Sponsor: National Culture and Arts Foundation, Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government
The Internet has been an essential medium for spreading and transmitting information since its invention, embedded in our lives over time. It is a banal everyday tool and revolutionary innovation, a new and exciting interface, and a root causing numbness and boredom, an innovative source of information yet a disease that distracts people’s attention. The continually updating flows that connect virtual space and physical reality sustain the interpersonal emotions and people’s collective consciousness and networked entities. As the shrinking devices gradually become extensions of our bodies and consciousness, the discussion of the dissolving boundary between the virtual and the real emerges again.
Scholar Wendy Chun used the term “The Wonderful Creepiness” in her book “Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media.” She describes the Internet’s duplicity, the wonderfulness, and the creepiness, attributed to its digitality connectivity. Can the Internet and new technology picture an idea of Utopia? Or is it a dangerous zone isolated from reality and full of surveillance and alert with its invisibility? How do new media technology create subtle intimacy and alienation between human and machine interaction in the process of being used, leading to both expectation and pessimism?
The exhibition “The Wonderful Creepiness” explores multiple dimensions of the Internet and digital technologies that extend the intertwined relationship between human and (technological) artifacts through contemporary practices. Artists Po-Hao Chi, Mengtai Zhang, and Rosalie Yu apply creative technologies (i.e., 3D scanning, web applications, VR, and mobile communication) to reshape future connectivity. In the digital era, under the influence of the epidemic, their works echo the entanglement of hybrid realities that no one can escape.
● CHI Po Hao, RECEITER(s), 2019, Mobile devices, Webpage, Internet, HTML, Javascript, Customized software
● Mengtai Zhang, Luna, 2019,2-channel video with sound
Credits: Video and idea and by Mengtai Zhang, sound by Lemon Guo
● CHI Po Hao, Mengtai Zhang, Virtual Confinement, FParticipatory WebVR Experiment, 2020
● Rosalie YU, Photographic Knitting Club, Archive Documents, Video, 2019-2021