As part of UNArt Center's strategy to become an international platform that interlinks technology, art, and education and the ambition of V2_Lab for the Unstable Media to reestablish its presence in China, both parties entered into a long-term strategic partnership. The partnership serves as a vehicle to initiate, facilitate and present cutting-edge artistic research by emerging talents with multidisciplinary practices. Its strategy of investing in young talents with long-term sustainable relations in mind, will ultimately lead to a thriving network of professionals between the two organisations, that serves as a Chinese-Dutch gateway for the exchange of ideas and opportunities in the field of technology, art and education.
UNArt Center & V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media will present the exhibition "Latent Spectators" from November 8, 2019 to October 20, 2019. The show will contain fourteen works by four artists. The exhibition starts with a simple question: is the current focus on precision necessarily the way towards the absolute? With our multitudes of data and scientific methodologies we’re not only feeding machines this rigid yet narrow perception of the world, this also becomes our explanation of it. It is worth interrogating if this latent sceneries can be captured by human and machine, exploring the limits of “ultimate reality” believed modern science by creating diverse and dynamic versions of worlds, or polycosmology? The exhibition invites artists who employ scientific methods to detect and reveal unnoticeable layers of natural phenomena in ourselves and nature, and map them into the sensorial realms of us. Showing that narrative does not lie merely in the alternation of device readings, but diffused into spatial and sensible experiences.
In the Measurement of Reality[1], Alfred W. Crosby traced how mechanical clocks, geometrically precise maps, double-entry book-keeping, precise algebraic and musical notations, and perspective painting constructed our perception of “the reality of the world”. Nowadays, scientific measuring devices, data production and interconnected systems have woven a latent net: with the tools and equipment revealing hidden patterns of the world, we seem to be able to put our hands on this level of reality. Yet, the layer constructed with data structures are beyond the comprehension of most perceivers, leaving the explanations to the hands of only a few. “Every thing”, as asserted by Derrida,is shot through with law, conventionality, technology (nomos, thesis, thekne), and this have in advance invaded physis and ruined its principle or its phantasm or purity.[2] This kind of “real” or “absolute”, as precise as it seems to be, is never tangible, or perceivable, as stated by Hannah Arendt, who also was cautious about the “glory” of modern science that it has been able to emancipate itself completely from all such anthropocentric, that is, truly humanistic, concerns, and retreated into the minimal changes of the apparatus readings[3]. Machine readings, nevertheless, reveals and in the same time conceals the “reality” - are there dynamic versions of worlds, still out there, to be “seen”?
[1]Alfred W. Crosby,The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600,Cambridge University Press; New Ed edition (December 13, 1997)
[2]Jacques Derrida, Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme,Fordham University Press; 1 edition (October 13, 2010)
[3]Hannah Arendt on Science, the Value of Space Exploration,and How Our Cosmic Aspirations Illuminate the Human Condition
