You find yourself in a bright room of rectangular shape and clean, white walls. You see ordinary furniture like what you would have in your living room and studies. You walk by a desk, or you touch upon a desk surface by accident…and the desk starts to type itself. You walk by an ordinary stand-up lamp and a voice, half-human, half-machine, chants something almost comprehensible but not quite. While you're still struggling to nail it down word by word, someone not far from you is earnestly planting his/her body in all kinds of possible postures. Here someone flaps his arms as if he's about to take off like a bird, or yet another quiet person trying her steps back and forth, finding the best angle for hips to turn. Here, by the desk in front of a monitor, someone is absorbed in reading and writing, lost in a certain detective world. Some busy hands are cutting and pasting paper slips diligently over two over-sized books. Two persons are playing computer games, but on the screen are moving lines and shapes splitting and combining. In the far end of the room, someone is strolling and meditating… All of them are writing…
The 2nd edition of The Writing Machine Collective explores the variety of writing: writing as performance, as methods of textual generation, writing process that is body-interactive, automated self-generation, writing via the appropriation of found text, sonification, visualization, and spatialization, all of which adopting programmed algorithms.
Writing is no longer a functional activity, It is a special site, like a playground, on which we explore its possible but unknown potentials. Such potentials are embedded in, as well as defined and limited by, the tools adopted.
WMC_e2 is a collective laboratory. It aims at presenting to the public accessible, quality works with a strong research impulse. Like all new media arts projects, WMC_e2 illustrate ways of tapping the machine capabilities of computer-based programming. In addition, we seek to ensure all the works to shed light on our banal everyday life setting and to engage in elements of our culture. In this edition, we particularly focused on the exploration of Generative Art, a form of art that has been extensively explored in 20th-century fine arts and experimental literature, and more recently in media arts that involve code-based programming.
The interests and individual strength of the 12 artists (or teams) pertain to very different possibilities of the future development of the "Writing Machine," and only a full assemblage of them helps to illustrate to the public the richness and diversity of this rather less attended aspect of new media arts. Along with the exhibition, a broad range of educational activities will be carried out to bring the project to fruition, including lectures, workshops, and an on-line virtual parallel exhibition, all of which will cover a six-month period.
In line with the main concern of new media, the WMC_e2 takes up the challenge to re-define the identity of a work of art as well as the notion of an author. With these works, the conventional artist now is no longer the sole, ultimate author, but becomes the initiator of a series of infinite creative possibilities by many co-/post-authors. A work of art is then captured as here-and-now moments along an open process of limitless emergence.
Linda Lai
January 2007
WMC_2 Executive Committee:
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR (Research / Project Development): Linda C.H. LAI
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Justin C.T. WONG
DIRECTOR FOR PUBLICATION AND EDUCATION: Hector RODRIGUEZ
EVENT EXECUTIVE: Yvonne M.Y. LAU
FEATURE EDITOR: Janice Y.L. LEUNG
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