Sunday, January 16, 2005
One Beijing museum leaps into the digital, global future
First-time visitors to the Millennium Art Museum’s new underground art centre might be startled as the framed “still-lifes” around them start magically moving - as if in Harry Potter books - speaking, or even changing places with other artworks metres or museums away.
These “moving pictures” are not an illusion, but the latest leap by one of China’s top museums to embrace the digital age and arts. They are also part of the Millennium Art Museum (MAM)’s wide-ranging plan “to make art more accessible to the public, more interactive, and more universal in appeal,” says Chaos Chen, one of the dynamic young innovators behind MAM’s transformation into a global art space.
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The Millennium’s exhibits will increasingly focus on works in new media, which cover the spectrum of “digital videos, Internet art/tech, digital photography, and other forms of digital imagery, including animations and virtual reality,” adds Wang, who is another prime force behind the museum’s race towards the future.
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The museum is also working with two of China’s top colleges, Tsinghua University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, along with the Boston-based MIT and the Dutch V2 Institute For Unstable Media (based in Rotterdam and partner in the Witte de With digital museum) in a May exhibition at the Millennium to focus on the neo-century’s convergence of art and technology in new media artworks.
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The May media exhibition at the Millennium, titled “In The Line of Flight,” will cover artworks “selected by a (global) group of distinguished curators, with representative works of telematic art, virtual reality, Net art, robotic art, interactive TV/cinema, software art, biotech art, data visualization and game art,” according to an outline of the show developed with New York’s Parsons School of Design and posted at http://www.newmediabeijing.org/.