Microwave International New Media Arts Festival 2022

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Microwave International New Media Arts Festival 2022 will be held during the period of 17th October – 13th November. Getting peoples’ minds blown for consecutively 26 years with artistic technology and innovation. The Festival consists of exhibitions, webinars and film screenings, to present the limitlessness of new media, at the same time reveal its possible connection with our daily life.

In the revelatory words of Nam June Paik, the father of video art: “Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.” Here, “Half Half” may refer to equal halves of a larger entity or an unknown equilibrium. If we calibrate the relationship between humans and machines on a scale of zero to one hundred, every single point at which we may achieve equilibrium is a variation. How do we build a balance that is symbotic? And this is the theme of Microwave International New Media Arts Festival 2022 – HALF HALF.

The main exhibition of the Festival will be held at the Exhibition Hall of Hong Kong City Hall from 28th October – 6th November, exhibits include a variety of works from artists all over the world: Using the language of escape rooms, artist duo Laia Cabrera and Isabelle Duverger explore reality and fantasy in Dream-e-scape, bringing visitors into an immersive lucid dream. Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s RE-ANIMATED is made from realistic geographic and ecological data as it examines the interstices between extinction, conservation, and immortality through artistic experience. In Neural Mirror created by Ultravioletto, the viewer looks at their reflection in a mirror but sees themselves as moving data points. Everyone gets a virtual assistant MOA in Charles Ayats’s My Own Assistant, which brings us to an interactive augmented reality set in a future world. Greek artist Kyriaki Goni’s video work Not allowed for algorithmic audiences compiles research on AI development and voice interfaces to create a fictional narrative. With a background in quantum computing, artist Dr Libby Heaney created Lady Chatterley’s Tinderbot. It is apparent that AI has moved beyond just offering assistance to humans by now.

Guided tours are available for institutions and groups, details can be found on Festival website or social media.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

The Festival began in 1996 as an annual video art festival and as technology progressed and became more accessible, video art slowly evolved to involve other media, and thus Microwave began to embrace a wider range of media art since then. As the first and only media art festival in Hong Kong, and one of the key pioneer media art festivals in Asia, Microwave brings cutting edge works and programmes to provoke thought in this creative hub every year.