This day-long session brings together four internationally renowned practitioners from across Asia, Europe, and the United States. They use online tools to create born-digital work that processes, visualises, and critiques the social effects of technology, and are developing alternative propositions for how we relate to the internet. These four discussions are intended to foster public discourse around how mass data collection, artificial intelligence, simulations, social media, and video-game design are being explored by contemporary practitioners working in the constantly changing online world.
| 10:00 am – 10:15am | Introduction |
| 10:15am – 11:15am | ‘Chinternet Stockholm Syndrome’: artist talk with Miao Ying |
| 11:15am – 12:15pm | ‘Making Digital Matter’: artist talk with Studio Moniker/Thomas Boland |
| 2:00pm – 3:00pm | Worlding – artist talk with Ian Cheng |
| 3:00pm – 4:20pm | ‘Poetic Computation and Non-Binary Futures’: artist talk with Taeyoon Choi |
| 4:30pm – 5:30pm | M+ Data Design Hackathon presentations and award ceremony |
Miao Ying is a Shanghai- and New York–based artist who navigates the possibilities available in the reduced sphere of the Chinese internet, critically and playfully reflecting on censorship. The absurdist visuals of her collaged website aesthetic, mashing together YouTube videos and commercial advertisements, heighten the acknowledgement of international web privatisation and monopolisation. Whether reflecting on political censorship or laissez-faire capitalism, Miao’s work takes the internet as its playground, decontextualising mass information and launching it into the artworld ether. Miao has shown her works at the CAFA Art Museum (2016); the KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2016); the New Museum (2016); OCAT Shanghai (2015); the Times Museum (2015); the Venice Biennale (2015); the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (2014); the Landesgalerie Linz (2012); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2008); the Shanghai Art Museum (2008); and the online digital art biennial The Wrong (2015). https://www.thedeadpixelofmyeye.com/
Thomas Boland is an Amsterdam-based creative developer who explores connections between the digital and physical worlds. After completing the Interaction Design course at ArtEZ, he worked as a designer and developer at the experimental digital design studio LUSTlab in The Hague. In 2017, he joined the interaction and media design studio Moniker, working alongside Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters. Moniker explores the characteristics of technology, how people use it, and how it influences daily life. Audiences are often asked to take part in the development of Moniker’s projects. https://studiomoniker.com/
Ian Cheng is an artist living in New York who makes simulations that explore mutation and our capacity to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video-game design and cognitive science, Cheng’s virtual ecosystems are populated with characters governed by competing models of artificial intelligence. Each attempts to perpetuate its approach amidst otherworldly environmental conditions. What emerges is an endless, unpredictable stream of artificial life, by turns familiar, uncertain, boring, and surprising—Cheng calls this ‘art with a nervous system’. He presented recent solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries (2018), the Carnegie Museum of Art (2017), and MoMA PS1 (2017). Recent group exhibitions featuring his work were held at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (2017), the Louisiana Museum (2017), Tate Modern (2017), the Yokohama Triennale (2017), the Hirshhorn Museum (2016), the Whitney Museum of American Art (2016), and the Taipei Biennial (2014). https://iancheng.com/
Taeyoon Choi is an artist, educator, and activist based in New York and Seoul. His art practice involves performances, electronics, drawings, and installations that form the basis for storytelling in public spaces. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and co-founded School for Poetic Computation, where he continues to organise sessions and teach classes. He also teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Recently, he has focused on unlearning the barrier between disability and normalcy, and enhancing accessibility and inclusion in art and technology. His solo exhibitions include Speakers’ Corners at Eyebeam in 2012, and his projects have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015) and the Shanghai Biennale (2012). He was an artist in residence at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University (2014), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace (2014), and Art Center Nabi (2006). He received commissions from SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul (2016) and the Art + Technology Lab at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014). He is currently interested in peer-to-peer, decentralised networks and is developing the Distributed Web of Care research initiative. https://taeyoonchoi.com/
