Museum goers press themselves against the blendid Collective’s interactive work Touch Me (the Netherlands, 2004).	Marnix de Nijs’ Beijing Accelerator (the Netherlands, 2006) .	Visitors to Synthetic Times found themselves under surveillance in David Rokeby’s installation Taken (Canada, 2002).

MEDIA art has a very short history on China’s mainland, where more traditional forms such as painting and sculpture tend to hold sway. So the arrival of a major survey of global media art practice at Beijing’s National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) set the local art world abuzz in the lead up to the Olympic Games.

What is media art? Broadly defined, it is art that utilizes contemporary technology and/or reflects upon the role of technology in modern life. Zhang Ga, a China-born, New York-based artist, curator and teacher, has made it his mission to bring the latest media art practices to China over the past few years. “I was in China in 2003 and I looked around in Chinese universities and talked to a lot of artists,” recalls Zhang. “I realized their understanding of new media art really remained at the level of DVDs, digital photography, a little bit of 2D interaction and flash. I thought it was important to introduce some of the most cutting edge, current media art production to China.”

During that visit, Zhang was invited by Tsinghua University to help introduce media art practices to China’s arts and academic community, which led to the inaugural Beijing International New Media Art Exhibition and Symposium in 2004. The event was repeated in 2005 and ’06. The director of the National Art Museum of China, Fan Di’an, then asked Zhang Ga to curate an exhibition of media art to be staged in the lead up to the Beijing Olympic Games. Zhang spent two years sourcing the best work from around the world, and on June 10 this year the “Synthetic Times” exhibition was unveiled.

Talking Heads and Surveillance Cameras

Visitors knew Synthetic Times was going to be something different before they even entered NAMOC. The giant arches of Edwin Van der Heide’s Pneumatic Sound Field (the Netherlands, 2006) straddled the museum’s entrance, forming an enormous tunnel. The arches held dozens of pneumatic valves, releasing air to produce spluttering, crackling sounds like static. Every so often the static reached a shattering crescendo, like a swarm of electric cicadas singing in the summer heat, and then fell into silence. The work was an aurally challenging representation of information overload in the modern age.

In one of the museum’s first galleries, visitors were greeted by an enormous face grinning down from the wall. This was Prosthetic Head (2003-08) by Australian artist Stelarc. Museum-goers could chat to the virtual being via a keyboard in front of the screen. To the delight of onlookers, the giant head answered any question they cared to pose, including where he was from and whether he had a girlfriend. Unfortunately, he was only programmed to communicate in English, but Chinese audiences seemed to enjoy the interaction nonetheless.

Another popular interactive work was Touch Me (blendid [Collective], the Netherlands, 2004), in essence a giant scanner fixed to the museum’s wall. Every so often a bright shaft of vertical light passed across the scanner and recorded a ghostly impression of spectators who pressed themselves against the glass. With each new sweep of light the previous image was erased and new impressions recorded. If no-one pressed against the glass, the screen cycled through old images, creating a layering effect akin to a series of digital Turin Shrouds. Initially amusing and a lot of fun, the blurry indistinct images took on a haunting air after a time, like ghosts from the past trying to reach into the present.

Mariana Rondon’s You Came with the Breeze - 2 (Venezuela, 2007-08) was similarly based on fleeting images. Two robot arms suspended from a large metal frame each ended in a ring roughly the size of a football. The rings were continually dipped into bowls of soapy fluid, before being swung into the center of the frame, where fans blew on the liquid to form giant bubbles. Mist sprayed into the bubbles and shimmering images projected from the rear briefly appeared on the water droplets, before the bubbles burst, the mist dissipated and the entire process began again. Images included a baby, a giant eye and, rather incongruously, a chicken. In the corner of the metal frame, indistinct naked figures were projected onto a solid plastic sphere, creating the effect of human forms swimming in a fish bowl. The work beautifully evoked the transient nature of images, suggesting that for all our archival technologies, time is always at work and eroding our attempts to fix memories.

Beijing’s rapid modernization inspired Marnix de Nijs’ Beijing Accelerator (the Netherlands, 2006), which comprised a giant metal arm on a central pivot. A seat and small joystick were positioned above the fulcrum, while a screen faced the seat from one end of the arm. Sitting in the center, gallery-goers could make the arm spin using the joystick, while a 360-degree view of a virtual cityscape played out before them. A literally dizzying work embodying Beijing’s frenetic pace of development.

Having circled the museum’s entire ground floor, visitors encountered David Rokeby’s Taken (Canada, 2002), a graphic demonstration of how surveillance technologies are used to monitor, record and classify individuals in crowded public spaces. Two large screens sat side by side on a wall. The right side featured a fuzzy yellow surveillance image of the crowd in front of the work, their image relayed via a small camera in the corner. It took some time to realize that while the image depicted gallery patrons in real time, it also retained traces of past observers in the form of ghostly shadows. Periodically a small rectangle, akin to a gun-sight, would single out an individual on screen, and relay a close-up of him or her to the blue-toned screen on the left. Words and phrases, sometimes amusing, sometimes sinister, flashed above the close-ups, such as “Unconcerned,” “Completely Convinced,” “Implicated,” and “Deeply Suspicious.” Periodically a mosaic of the close-ups appeared.

This is just a tiny sample of the dozens of works that delighted and intrigued visitors at Synthetic Times. The exhibition also elicited considerable excitement among Beijing’s creative community. Curator Zhang Ga hopes the comprehensive survey of international media art practice will have an impact on local artists, who Zhang believes have been affected by the inflated prices currently being paid for Chinese contemporary art. “Because of the auction market it seems very easy to make art,” he says. “Everybody’s making so much money, without really reflecting on what they actually contribute to the language of art. And I think Synthetic Times will probably act as a wakeup call — to let people realize there are works that are very sincere, very serious, and require a lot of dedication and research and experimentation, and that don’t take such an easy approach.”

More generally, Zhang hopes Synthetic Times will achieve what all the best art strives for — to enlarge people’s imagination and worldview. “Art is something that changes you over time; the way you look at the world, and eventually the way you perceive reality. And that eventually opens up new possibilities and perspectives.”