Dreaming in Motion: Australian New Media Art Comes to Sanlitun

Few in China are aware that as well as strange animals and a Mandarin-speaking former Prime Minister, Australia sports a thriving new media art scene comprising some of the world’s most innovative artists. The Synthetic Times exhibition at the National Art Museum of China just before the 2008 Olympics featured many Australian works, but now Beijingers have the chance to check out a showcase of exclusively Australian media art with DreamWorlds, a screen-based exhibition on the Sanlitun Village screen.

DreamWorlds features such internationally renowned names as Troy Innocent, Kate Richards and Daniel Crooks, as well as Australian Indigenous artist Warwick Thornton, whose Cannes award-winning feature film Samson and Delilah screened in Beijing last year as part of the Australian Film Festival.

DreamWorlds will be unveiled on the Sanlitun Village screen this Saturday (September 4) at 6.30pm, and will then screen daily every half hour from 10am-midnight until Saturday, October 16.

Dan Edwards caught up with curator Melinda Rackham, former director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology, to find out what audiences can expect from the DreamWorlds showcase.

What can visitors expect from DreamWorlds?
They will be dazzled! The first thing visitors will notice is the impact that these powerful artworks have on the 27-meter-long Sanlitun Village screen. The works have been created across a plurality of new media and moving image genres, and will be showing on the screen in constantly reforming clusters, interspersed with other Sanlitun screen content.

The program has been constructed this way to evoke the sense of hyperlinked media, recreating something similar to browsing the web and forming new links dependent on the way you navigate through information or an artwork or move through a game world. Contemporary moving image audiences are frequently not seated or contained in a gallery space, and DreamWorlds is designed for these mobile city viewers.

How did you go about selecting the artists and videos for the exhibition? Have you attempted to “pitch” the content specifically for a Chinese audience?
I selected the artists using several criteria. I wanted to gather a group of Australian artists who are working at a high level in unique ways with diverse subject matter – making intelligent, thoughtful and aesthetically appealing new media art.

Technical diversity played a big role as I wanted to present artists working across many aspects of new media and the moving image. The final selection of works range from animation, manipulated video art, generative software, the virtual worlds contained within games engines and game modifications, cinema, and works generated by real time choreography.

The exhibition is pitched to a Chinese audience in the sense that these works have not been seen before in China.

What makes Australian media art distinctive or different from similar work in other countries?
Australia has a very privileged perspective in the world – a continent surrounded by sea located deep in the southern hemisphere, buffered in many senses from world politics and global cultural drivers. These moving artworks reflect the cultural and geographic environment from which they emerged – from the obvious harsh quality of light to a more subtle sense of irony, a larrikin or dark humour and a dogged persistence that is born from colonialism, migration and the refugee experience.

What are your feelings about art being presented in the context of a shopping mall?
Absolutely delighted! We live in media-dense cities and are immersed in moving imagery and floating soundscapes. We are surrounded by screens, from mobile phones to LEDS, TV screens to sports stadium screens. The Sanlitun Village screen is the perfect domain for bringing art to audiences living their daily life. There is a real potential here for art and commerce to sit side by side in a public space, rather than being hidden inside a gallery or museum.

I have been involved in the growing global movement to use screens as exhibition platforms for many years now, and dedicated screens of all shapes and sizes are being incorporated into architectural designs to augment sculpture as public art. It's a very exciting time as we are just starting to appreciate the use of this powerful artistic medium to shape the cityscapes of the 21st century.

DreamWorlds, Sanlitun Village screen, daily 10am-midnight from Saturday, September 4 to Saturday, October 16. Free.