Microwave International New Media Arts Festival

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Microwave International New Media Arts Festival 2024 will be held during the period of 25^th October – 24^th November.  Getting peoples’ minds blown for consecutively 28 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.

We are born to be emotional, but we are often at a loss for words when we try to articulate how we feel and when we express our empathy and care. During the pandemic, people used digital technology to mitigate social isolation and to work. Since then, more have been using social media to enrich their social and daily lives, from remote Chinese medical consultations and online get togethers to metaverse concerts. Research for this iteration of the festival began in the early 2020s; we studied the impact of the pandemic on people trapped in their homes and cities, unable to go about their lives as usual, and the effects of daily anxiety during and in the aftermath of the outbreak.

What is the first thing you do when you wake up every day? Do you reach for your smartphone beside the bed and scroll through social media? Or do you go to the bathroom and freshen up for work? Have you taken a good look at yourself in the mirror? Based in Australia, SensiLab presents Mirror Ritual, a real-time affective interface that generates poetry with artificial intelligence. When it comes to the smartphone, the most far-reaching product of our times, we should discuss not only its function and influence, but also how it has achieved its social status as a product we can no longer live without. Through the interactive installation Casper’s EX, Dutch artist Casper de Jong summons all the “heartbreakers” of our times to let technology, this double-edged sword of good and bad, have a taste of ruthlessness. German artist duo Juliana and Andrey Vrady’sinteractive artificial intelligence installation DREAM BLENDER HONG KONG encourages self-reflection: where do we come from? Do our emotions have appearances? Can a person’s emotions and dreams, even their imagination about the future, be conveyed to others using artificial intelligence? Are we concerned about ourselves or the social symbols attached to appearances? In Kind Words, American game developer Ziba Scott uses the ordinary medium of computer games to let visitors understand that language is as much of a double-edged sword as technology, and that sometimes all we need is a little verbal boost.

How You Doin’ —a love letter in the form of an art festival. Other than the exhibition, Unconference is launching a series of episodes online, inviting experts to speak and respond to the topics of the show. In collaboration with creative teams from Taiwan and Finland, Project Room O is presenting Culture Stew, which uses “hack culture” as a starting point to engage in food experiments, showcases of traditional crafts and exchange between the two cultures, semi-scientific sensory experiments, and sharings about strange tales of forest and mountain spirits. The exhibition is also accompanied by screenings of international films, including a special screening of works by renowned video artist Bill Viola at the exhibition opening, a screening tour of Ars Electronica Festival from Austria, and a special screening of Boundaries at the exhibition closing.

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