AIR SPRING 2020 GROUP EXHIBITION
DIGITAL HUMANITY
“This is the future”, A digital sculpture speaks as if with its own humanities.
The post-epidemic world era is undergoing profound global systemic changes, new technologies are affecting future human production patterns, lifestyles, communication experiences, and beyond. In many senses, the booming landscape allows us to receive new ideas and information more quickly than ever before, and efficiencies are compounding. When we are both producers and receivers, being exposed to huge amounts of data and information in rapid iterations, what approaches do we use to retain and certify our “presents”, before it becomes "history" in the future?
In the context of rapid development, humanities research methods are innovating as well. The interdisciplinary integration of digitization and humanities transformed a large number of cultural research materials into visual information and data, which then are classified and archived. Can such a method or subsequent development fully reflect the characteristics, individuality, differences, and diversities emphasized in humanities studies? Whether in the process of humanistic research materials production or research, the subjective emotions and emotions generated or integrated by the subject of "human", and the resulting meaning and value, should not be lost in the process of digitalization?
The action of making artworks as a way for artists to visualize their subjective research content and daily humanistic experiences, artists are also constantly pushing their artistic expressions and practices into the new, cross-border integration, or breakthrough personal boundaries. PLAN8T launched the Online Artists Residency program during the pandemic times and met 11 artists through the program, now the program finally lands on this exhibition ground. The Digital Humanity exhibition brings together artists from different cultural contexts and academic backgrounds from around the world, using a variety of different technologies and artistic methods as a vehicle and medium to jointly discuss the profound issues of humanity, technology, and the future, blending concepts of colliding ideas. Thereby promoting future-oriented cross-domain cultural innovations.
This exhibition attempts to build a new dialogue platform, taking digital technologies and other emerging mediums as the entry point, presenting the circumstantial contemporary humanities in different contexts, and embodying cultural diversities. The works are assembled and arranged in four dimensions: structural reconstructions, dialogue between the past and the present; realistic technology, dialogue between technology and art; the dialogue between information symbols, data, and images; open discussions, dialogue between different civilizations evoked by communication, collision, and integration. Rooted in multiple respective cultural backgrounds, artists interpret and display their understanding towards Digital Humanity, taking history into the consideration, and then reimagining the future through reflection, while responding to the cultural traditions and conventions.
