Microwave International New Media Festival 2012@ Cityhall Hong Kong

Today I visited the Microwave International New Media Festival 2012 which was held in the Hong Kong City Hall. There were six main exhibits namely:

1. David Link: Love-letters 1.0 MUC= Resurrection, A Memorial (2009)
2. Ebru Kurbak, Mahir M. Yavuz: News Knitter (2007)
3. Ernesto Klar: Convergenze Parallele (2006)
4. Haru Ji, Graham Wakefield: Time of Doubles: Flux (2011)
5. UCLA Arts Software Studio: Works of UCLA Arts Software Studio (2012)
6. Helen Pritchard, Winnie Soon: If I wrote you a love letter would you write back? (And Thousands     of Other Questions) (2012)

This exhibition is able to successfully show the contemporary use of new media to create artworks as the exhibits are from various countries ranging from Germany to Turkey, Korea, UK, U.S., and even Hong Kong. Some pieces (2,3 and 6) are even collaborated between two artists from two different countries.

Most of these exhibits incorporates the audience into the piece by allowing us to actively take part. This means that the audience must physically visit the exhibit in order to enjoy the aesthetic impacts of the piece. Also, for many of these pieces, simply looking at snapshots of the artwork is insufficient to give the audience an understanding of the piece as its content is either in constant motion, involves sound or even involves other external factors. This interactive element makes the exhibition as a whole and each exhibit more interesting. My favourite art-pieces in this exhibition were exhibits 1 and 3. The reason why I chose exhibit 1 is due to the fact that I was intrigued by story and history behind this piece, and I chose exhibit 3 because Klar was able to truly manipulate modern technology and incorporate audiences into creating the aesthetic and auditory effects of the piece.

To conclude, through the several gallery visits, it is apparent that contemporary artists are deviating from traditional painting or sculptural artworks where the audiences' physical presence in the exhibition will not affect their enjoyment of the art-piece. Instead they are using technology efficiently and also as an element of their works in order to allow audiences to actively participate and hence draw more people to visit art exhibitions.