11:00 minutes
Living Distance by Xin Liu is a VR work and two-channel video based on a real mission in which the artist’s wisdom tooth was sent to outer space and back down to Earth again. In the VR work, users play the role of the tooth, journeying from the mouth to outer space, with a poetic narration by Liu. The piece is exquisitely rendered, with deep blacks that make the experience especially powerful on a Vive Pro. Eventually, the piece concludes that even in exceeding the envelope of the earth, one doesn’t actually leave gravity behind. Rather, in zero gravity orbit, everything falls toward the Earth at the same rate. What is achieved through the tooth‘s adventure isn’t escape or transcendence, but a new perspective, a new relationship with home.
Xin Liu’s work revolves around various ways of experiencing distance, and exploring the tension between personal experience and technological society. Trained as an engineer, she conducts scientific research that is infused with personal narrative, reconfiguring technological tools to offer unexpected affective experiences and artefacts. In one recent work, she performed a choreographed dance in a zero-gravity parabolic flight; in another, she sent her wisdom tooth to outer space on a private space mission. In works such as these, she uses complex technological systems to explore new experiences of the self. Her work’s technological sophistication and rigorous dedication to the personal and poetic yields new ways of understanding technological subjectivity.
Book Review: "The State and The Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions" | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Images courtesy of Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore April 9, 2019 By Chin Ailin (734 words, four-minute read) Commissioned by the Institute of Policy Studies of Singapore (IPS) to trace the course of cultural policy in Singapore from the 1950s to the present, The State and the Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions is a comprehensive tome that should serve as an essential text in time to come for any student’s introduction to Singapore’s arts and cultural policies...
Reunion — Hand-Embroidered School Class Portraits - Photographs and text by Diane Meyer | LensCulture Feature Reunion — Hand-Embroidered School Class Portraits By obscuring the faces with embroidery — which would typically be the most important parts of these elementary school class portraits — otherwise overlooked details are brought into focus, such as body language and other embodiments of social convention...
Gregory Halpern spent five years shooting ZZYZX , and another year editing the results, from an estimated thousand rolls of film, about half of which were shot in the final year after his Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to live in California...
With Sway's Blessing, SF Rapper Frak Is Ready to Level Up | KQED Skip to Nav Skip to Main Skip to Footer upper waypoint Arts & Culture With Sway's Blessing, SF Rapper Frak Is Ready to Level Up Nastia Voynovskaya Feb 9 Save Article Save Article Failed to save article Please try again Email Frak at Billy Goat Hill in San Francisco on Feb...
The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...
MervEspina and the Green Papaya Art Projects (via The Myanmar Times) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles September 22, 2018 With the support of Japan Foundation and collaboration of Myanm/Art, MervEspina, artist and researcher from Philippines talked about Green Papaya Art Projects whose essence can be rendered as ‘never ripe, never rotten’...
Facing one another, each projection screen of the work Food Fight respectively features Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris preparing multi-course meals at a kitchen counter...
El gran pacto de Chile (The Great Pact) and La balserita de Puerto Gala (The Raft) were part of the “Museo Futuro”, an exhibition in which the artist presented nine miniature dioramas staging fragments of Chile’s history, from its colonial invasions to the present...
Air Con: Who Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints October 8, 2021 By Dhinesha Karthigesu (1,330 words, 5-minute read) Who do you want to be when you grow up? At the end of the play AIR CON , the character William (Nick Davis) asks the character Asif (Ryan Lee Bhaskaran) this question...