Code : Blue – Confluence of Currents The MILLENNIUM DIALOGUE 2006

3rd Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium

June 30 – July 10 2006
New Media Art Center, China Millennium Art Museum
Beijing Cubic Art Center, Dashanzi Art District (Factory 798)
Beijing, CHINA
http://newmediabeijing.org

Presented by:
Tsinghua University China
Millennium Art Museum

In Collaboration with:
V2_Institute for the Unstable Media
ZKM | Center for Art and Media
Ars Electronica Center
Transmediale
Art Center Nabi
Groupe Molior

Introduction

The new millennium has witnessed the growing vitality throughout the world of new media art, an art mediated via digital means, often with the internet as its platform. This emerging art, originating from an increasingly technologically dependent society, not only challenges traditional creative media, and ways of thinking, but also posits to artists and cultural workers new questions concerning all realms of contemporary life.

Under the auspices of Millennium Dialogue, the First and Second Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium successfully mounted two ground-breaking exhibitions and symposia in 2004 and 2005 respectively at the China Millennium Museum in Beijing. Enlisting a number of key players in the realm of media art throughout the world as partners, "Millennium Dialogue" aims at establishing a global, constructive platform for dialogue and exchange with the most current discourse in new media arts production and theorization to advance and promote digital arts and education in China.

At the helm of the project are three prominent institutions, with Tsinghua University as host, one of the most acclaimed research and educational institutions of China, joined by ZKM | Center for Art and Media of Karlsruhe, Germany, the World’s largest media arts center, and V2_Institute for the Unstable Media of Rotterdam, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival maker.

With the repercussion of Millennium Dialogue 2004 and 2005 still undulating, 2006 sees another stellar gathering of the international new media art community in Beijing. The Third Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium, marking the inauguration of the newly established, spectacular Beijing Creative Industries Zone, takes to the Chinese capital another highly charged, thought provoking new media art exhibition revolving on the central theme – Code:Blue, and a symposium which furthers the discourse of new media art practice and education with global perspective.

Theme exhibition and symposium
Code:Blue - Confluence of Currents

In the early 1400s, 80 years before Columbus set foot on the Americas, Chinese fleets led by Zheng He, an eunuch admiral, traversed the Indian Ocean reaching the Cape of Good Hope numerous times, establishing peaceful relationships with principalities and kingdoms along their voyage routes, propelling cultural understandings, and precipitating trading activities among many nations. The rise of China in the 21st century as a major economic player in the Pacific region and beyond revives the lost legacy of China as an oceangoing nation, and unveils her creative merchandising spirit. China’s seclusion from the outside world that resulted in an isolated “earth” civilization was but a temporary historical interruption, contrary to the perception that it is the intrinsic nature of Chinese culture.

“Code:Blue” attempts to symbolically establish a relationship between China’s once ocean-minded past and her active engagement and rigorous interaction with current global influences both economically and culturally in an increasingly reciprocal construct, visible in areas such as trade / commerce, migration / mobility, identity / nationality, East / West, South / North and their dichotomies either as liberating high tides or as potentially perilous waters. The exhibition and symposium also metaphorically seek the confluence of these multiple cultural and economic currents, and propose Blue as transparency and deepness, flow and volatility, expanse and transcendence. The symposium will examine the increasingly interconnected global flux of information manifested through social and technological networks, reflect on the remapping and reconfiguration of cultural landscapes under the new geopolitical and geo-economic constellation in the 21st century, explore novel ways of artistic intervention in the post-bubble era of the Web2 hype in which a world market consolidates the once discursive, de-centralized net space, and an attention economy replaces the production based economic model, creating new social classes and cultural strata. By re-contextualizing utopian visions and avant-garde propositions that have been the driving force of electronic art and discourse, the symposium proposes the potentials of media art as interventionist, constructing reflexive relationships with technological vehicles at the threshold of new paradigm shift, seeking alternatives at the crossroad of planetary civilization in which global economic redistribution and transcultural production both converge and collide.

“Code: Blue” is an international exhibition and symposium, which comprises works by established and emerging media artists, presenting artist and expert discussions, each giving his/her own insightful approach to the broad thematic structure, rendering a diversity of interpretations and raising issues imminent and critical to the fluctuating social, cultural and economic circumstances across the world. “Code:Blue” presents representative works of telematic art, virtual reality, net art, robotic art, interactive cinema, nano art, and other new forms facilitated through media technologies with critical reflections on the impact of pervasiveness of technology. A subset of the “Code: Blue” is programmed as “The Shipment From China” in which a body of projects by Chinese media artists using shipping containers as a metaphor as well as transporting vehicles for the creation of their works will participate in the ISEA 2006 / ZeroOne Festival in August 2006. The ISEA 2006 in conjunction with ZeroOne: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, is hosted by the city of San Jose, in the Silicon Valley in the United States. “Container Culture” is one of the exhibition themes of the ISEA2006 / ZeroOne Festival.

Works and Artists Presented in the Theme Exhibition “Code : Blue”
Death Before Disco by Herwig Weiser
Spatial Sound by Marnix De Nijus
Polyptic by George Legrady
Word Processor by Ingo Gunther
Sustainable by David Birchfield, David Lorig, Kelly Phillips
One Thousand Year Dawn by John Gerrard
We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programs by Daniel Sauter & Osman Khan
The Well by Art Center Nabi
Field – Granular::Synthesis by Kurt Hentschlåger and Ulf Langheinrich
Poetry Machine by David Link
The Catalogue by Chris Oakley
Banlieue du Vide by Thomas Koener
Pipeline by Steven Silberg
The Tobacco Project by Xu Bing
disCONNECTION by Xing Danwen
Altitude Zero by Hu Jieming
Third Eye by Jin Jiangbo
Drift Bottle by Huang Shi
Water by Yaobin

Academic Exchange Exhibition

1. Teleboat 798 Parsons School of Design and Tsinghua Academy of Art and Desing (Collaboration)
2. Water Bowls UCLA (Victoria Vesna, collaborative)
3. Works from other Chinese art educational institutes including China Academy of Fine Art, Central Academy of Fine Art, Peking University)

Guest Exhibition - The Canadian Link

Special Screening Programs

1. Ars Electronica - 25 Years of Excellency in Electronic Arts
2. transmediale - Festival for Art and Digital Culture

“Code:Blue” Symposium

Brian Holmes (Writer, media theorist)
Angelica Schimtt (Media theorist)
Wang Chunyan (Professor, director of Creative Commons, China Chapter)
Soh Yeong Roh (Director, Art Center Nabi)

B) The Future of the Present
- Art Institutions in the Age of Globalization

Fan Di’an (Director, China National Art Museum)
Hannah Redler (Media art director, National Science Museum London)
Alex Adriaanens (Director, V2_Institute for the Unstable Media)

Part 2
The Vision of Blue
- Artistic Interventions, Strategies, and Prospects

Timothy Druckrey (Curator)
John Gerrad (Artist)
Ai Weiwei (Artist, architect)
Ingo Günther (Artist)
Julianne Piece (Curator)
Victoria Vesna (Professor, UCLA)
Sven Travis (Professor, Parsons School of Design)
David Link (Artist)
Andreas Broeckmann (Director, transmediale)
Thomas Munz (Curator, transmediale)

Artistic Directors:
Lu Xiaobo, Zhang Ga

Curators:
Zhang Ga, Timothy Druckrey

Curatorial Consultants: Alex Adriaansens - Director, V2_, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Andreas Broeckmann - Director, transmediale, Berlin, Germany
Thomas Munz - Curator, transmediale, Berlin, Germany
Soh Yeong Roh - Director, Art Center NABI, Seoul, S. Korea
Gerfried Stocker - Director, Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria
Peter Weibel - CEO, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany

Supported by
Ministry of Culture, P.R. China
Ministry of Science, P.R. China
Ministry of Information Technologies, P.R. China
Ministry of Education, P.R. China
China Art and Literary Association
Chinese Artists Association

Sponsored by
Gehua Cultural Development Group
Beijing Municipal Government
BANQ
Royal Netherlands Embassy Beijing
Mondriaan Foundation, Netherlands
The German Foreign Ministry
Goethe Institut, Beijing
Cultural Ireland
David Bermant foundation
University of California at Los Angles
Art Center Nabi
SK Telecom
Bundeskanleramt (Austria)
Kultur Tirol
Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade of Canada,
Ministère des relations internationales du Québec,
Ministère de la culture et des communications du Québec,
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec,
Conseil des arts de Montréal,
Conseil des arts du Canada
CIAM (Centre interuniversiatire des arts médiatiques)
(More to follow)

Media Partnership

China News Agency
CCTV (Central China TV)– Channel 1
People’s daily
China Education Daily
GuangMing Daily
China Youth Daily
Beijing Youth Daily
WenHui (Shanghai)
Morning Post
Art Observer
Art and Design
China Intellectual Rights Reports
China Entrepreneur
Tsinghua University TV and News Center
Visual China
New China Daily
Science Daily
Science Periodical
China Library News
China Culture Daily
CCTV – Digital Arts
China Product Design News
Beijing Society of Dancing
CCTV Cultural News Channel
CCTV Economics Channel
CCTV Channel 1
CCTV Channel 10
CCTV Channel 4
Radio China Cultural News
Beijing TV
CG Magazine
Vision Magazine
New Tsinghua Magazine
Tsinghua TV
MUSIC Magazine
Beijing Stars Daily
Capital Daily
Beijing Evening News
Tianjing Daily

About the venues:

China Millennium Art Museum is one of the most important institutions for presenting art exhibitions and cultural activities in China. Its holding company is Beijing Gehua Cultural Development Group, which manages and operates three large subsidiaries: Beijing Gehua Culture Center (China Millennium Art Museum), Beijing Gehua Technology Center and Beijing Gehua Broadcasting Center. Under the direct supervision of the Beijing Municipal Government, Gehua Group is the pivotal presentation and research enterprise of the capital’s culture landscape with influences radiating to the whole nation.

New Media Art Center of China Millennium Art Museum http://www.gehua.com/ghwhzx/whhz/index.shtml

Code:Blue – Confluence of Currents
The MILLENNIUM DIALOGUE 2006
3rd Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium will open in the New Media Art Center of the China Millennium Art Museum to mark the inauguration of the spectacular, over 100.000 square meters Gehua Headquarters. The New Media Art Center is a brand new, state of the art facility exclusively designed to meet the growing needs of media art presentation and conference for China and as a platform for international media art exchange.

China Millennium Art Museum has been a major venue for important national and international art exhibitions, biennales, large-scale performances and other cultural activities. Since its launch to celebrate the millennium in 2000, it has received millions of visitors.

Beijing Cubic Art Center http://www.11-art.com

Located inside the hotbed of Beijing’s DASHANZI art district (formerly Factory 798), Beijing Cubic Art Center is committed to finding new ways to implement technology as a means of communication. It provides a space for the dialogue between art and technology. It is an art space for discovering the work of new and avant-garde artists, as well as a research lab for investigating the intersections between art and science. The gallery focuses upon experimental digital electronic media art but is also open to working with artists in other media, conducting seminars, performances and forums in all ranges of discussion. The Center is constantly in search of new forms of expression and experimentation and gladly accepts proposal submissions for new projects.