WORLD ON A WIRE
HYUNDAI MOTORSTUDIO / RHIZOME
BEIJING, CHINA

JANUARY 28, 2021 – APRIL 5, 2021

My video Butterfly Room: Special Edition is included in “HYUNDAI x Rhizome of the New Museum: World on a Wire.” A new exhibition in Beijing, China that transforms the gallery space into a hybrid-reality vivarium of vivid, artist-made synthetic life forms, exploring the possibilities and poetics of simulation as artistic practice.

» worldonawire.net

Butterfly Room: Special Edition is a 45 min, 4k, 60fps animation displayed on a 50ft LED wall.

“In this work, newly adapted for large-scale presentation, 100 fictitious creatures interact, infusing one another with movement and color to create a dynamic onscreen ecosystem, a kind of digital aquarium. The sense of emergent biology is undercut by the heightened artificiality of Robak’s creatures, which reminds viewers that these life forms originated in the artist’s mind and evolved through his digital tools.”
-Rhizome Press Release

Participating artists include:

Sascha Pohflepp, Alessia Nigretti, and Matthew Lutz
ZZYW / Zhenzhen Qi & Yang Wang
Timur Si-Qin
Theo Triantafyllidis
Rachel Rossin
Tabor Robak
Pete Jiadong Qiang
Mariia Fedorova
JooYoung Oh
Ye Nan
Lu Fei & Lei Jianhao

Curatorial Statement

In a technological sense, simulations can be thought of as efforts to model dynamic processes or situations. As designer Francis Tseng has pointed out, such simulations go beyond the neutral description of an underlying reality: they often project forward in time, and they may embed certain belief systems in a particular model of the world or its future. In particular, Tseng argues, simulations are often defined by “perceived rigor, correctness, and mathematical infallibility.”

The works in “HYUNDAI x Rhizome of the New Museum: World on a Wire” call this authority into question, taking up the practice of simulation in order to highlight its contingent and subjective aspects. Some of the works make use of optical technologies, from pre-cinema visual effects to 3D printing, virtual reality, and augmented reality, to draw attention to simulation as a visual technology. Others focus on simulation as a means of simplifying rule sets and modeling behaviors, often for the purpose of projecting expected outcomes. Through these disparate approaches, the works call into question the distinction between reality and representation, highlighting the ways in which simulation as a practice can not be separated from the world it seeks to model.

The exhibition draws its title from a 1973 TV movie by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder in which a massive computer simulation causes the protagonist to question whether his own reality is also a virtual construction, ultimately driving him to insanity. This paranoiac horror–in which the real world is revealed to be nothing more than a simulation–is recast in this exhibition in more ambivalent terms: simulation may be a way of wielding power over its subjects, but it also offers a possible technique through which to reimagine our world–particularly our relationship with technology and the natural environment–together.

Curator : Michael Connor (Rhizome of the New Museum) in collaboration with Baoyang Chen (Central Academy of Fine Arts) and Taiyun Kim (Hyundai Motor Company)