In collaboration with the Times Museum Media Lab, the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology has launched the “Kai Wu Studio”, an interdisciplinary call for residency in May. Over the last month, we have received over 60 proposals from artists and researchers from various locations and backgrounds worldwide. After many discussions among the organizers, we are pleased to announce artists Ziyang Wu, Xi Lei, Li Shuang & Mohamed Almusibli, and Li Dan have been selected for the 2021-2022 “Kai Wu Studio” program.
Among them, artists Ziyang Wu, Xi Lei, Li Shuang & Mohamed Almusibli, will each receive an RMB 40,000 residency and support fund from their collaborative network to complete their projects at Media Lab from later this to 2022. Li Dan‘s project, Denoise, has been selected for the Digital Residency Program and will receive RMB 20,000 in creative funding and support from our partner networks. The result of Li Dan’s project will be published on the Media Lab digital platform in the coming year.
Selected Proposals
Ziyang Wu, Future_Forecast
Future_Forecast is a live-simulation online environment that presents a networked ecosystem built using predictive analytical modeling data. Datasets about the future of climate and environmental change, immigration and migration, as well as urban and economic development in Asia, are trained and connected to plant model, need model, and threat model, to drive a 3D environmental simulation.
In the simulated networked ecosystem, rising sea levels in Asia’s future are experienced as a change in speed of networked waterfalls, predictive Asian immigration patterns are witnessed as virtual organisms populating and re-populating different areas in the online world, and the financial futures of Asia’s stock market are seen as virtual sunlight levels.
Future_Forecast is intended to be live-experienced online. Interactive 3D graphics and models will be embedded on the web page and VR space where participants can explore and interact with the online environment.
Xi Lei, Another aquatic future: Autonomous floating wetlands
For the “Kai Wu Studio” residency project, I will integrate plant power generation with floating artificial wetland technology to transform it into a consumer of electricity, based on the inherent qualities of such symbiosis. In some contemporary plant-powered electricity technologies, plants must cooperate with microorganisms to generate electricity, and these power generators are no longer the externalizations of human organs. Strictly speaking, it can’t even be considered an external organ of the floating artificial wetland but as a critical component of their symbiotic relationship. At the same time, I will also explore how self-powered floating artificial wetlands can generate new organic relationships with the natural and cultural environments of the PRD region, and thus providing a non-anthropocentric basis for imagining future communities on water.
Li Shuang & Mohamed Almusibli, Thousands of lives (working title)
This project aims to explore disruptive scenarios and search for potential exits to the dominating technocracy and capital logic. It also addresses how the Internet and technology profoundly impact children and childhood, this contemporary notion of modern invention. We propose to write and stage a play based on the ‘war’ between primary schoolers and the platform DingTalk at the beginning of the 2020 lockdown. We will conduct research with various tech companies and work with local children (6-12 years old) to develop the script and performance and present it to the general public.
Digital Residency
Dan Li, Denoise (working title)
As anthropologist David Graeber says, the promises from technological progress and acceleration decades ago have not been materialized, with the only exception of simulation. Computer graphics embody an impulse to simulate everything material. When we move on to 3D rendering, however, we often encounter images covered with sanded noise. The noise occurs because the sampling rate is not high enough and ultimately suggests insufficient arithmetic power, a problem linked to the rising arithmetic anxiety of our time. Similar to sandstorm management attempts to contain sand as geographic noise, various denoiser programs are used to remove these pictorial noises. The new AI denoiser is the outcome of carrying out a lot of practical and arithmetic power buildup. Here the extraction of sand (silicon, arithmetic) is used to remove sand (noise). When the 3D world becomes static, the picture is often smooth and perfect. When the still frame moves, everything restores its original form. That is what Jean Baudrillard referred to as the moment of hyperreality. Denoiser is eager to erase the disrupted moment so that the simulated worlds of games, military, industries can maintain the framerate. If noise is electronically absent, does it reveal, divulge the presence of particular materiality? And how does noise as an artifact embody the nature of technology?
Co-organized by Media Lab and Research Network for Philosophy and Technology
New media art production partner: Shanghai Helu Expo Culture Communication Co., Ltd.
Space partner: HB Station
Collaborative Networks：
Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area International Communication Research Center of Sun Yat-sen University
Research Center for Science and Human Imagination, Southern University of Science and Technology
CUHK (Shen Zhen) University Arts Centre
Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society (AIRS)
HKUST (Guangzhou) Computational Media and Arts
MetaObjects
