Light Year 24: Passenger Moments

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Queens Times: Queens Times article-Video Exhibition on the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage

World Journal: World Journal- New York and Berlin

Ming Pao daily: Ming Pao Daily- Manhattan Bridge Public Art

DW News: DW News-Light Year 24: Passenger Moments

My Brooklyn Calendar: my brooklyn calendar

Art In Dumbo: Art in Dumbo

Light Year24

Passenger Moments

Curator: Luchia Meihua Lee

The April 2017 version of the New York Festival of Light is entitled Passenger Moment, a title which designates reacting to a system of thought that is based on life. As humans, we are confronted with a transitory existence that is relative to the world when we arrived. Included in this exhibit are five artists who use their personal experiences in life to expand the relationship between themselves and their subjects, and furthermore to express their concerns about the surroundings. This presentation is not to celebrate the beauty of nature or to praise the charming, romantic and magnificent. Instead of that, we investigate self and society.  Poyen Wang in A Fabricated Personal History took faces of stranger children and transferred them to familiar yet alien faces. In doing so, he addresses the assimilation period to the new land or the new world. All various color skins are also present in this multi-cultural city and in the Skin Deep project sketched by Rosalie Yu and Alon Chitayat, where a wide variety of human faces appear in the running video that been painted in different colors. The dripping lines and colors show its spontaneous drawing texture and a cold, lifeless face as urban residents pass by. After learning the various languages, the letters and venues in another way turn to familiar or unfamiliar ways to connect people universally, as decoded by Meng Chih Chiang’s A Stranger to Words that intertwines lines and mingles them with letters. The turning shape takes the viewer to an illuminated and illusionary world. In our materials world, we take pride in rapid high-tech development, ignoring the harmful effect on the environment and our very lives. Overused consumer goods turn to be undecomposed chemical elements that fly around in Jeremiah Teipen’s Ice Cubes Melting in a Plastic Cup. Also, the 30,000 beverage cans – the number used by the average American in a lifetime - that drop onto Chinchih Yang’s head in Kill Me or Change remind us of the astonishing quantities of waste that we have created and that are so deleterious to the earth, the planet which we only recently have come to see as fragile. This view project in this light year is without doctrine, but a beautiful, creative, abstract image that indicates us as strangers to this world.

Participating Artists and video titles (alphabetical by last name)

• ·        Meng Chih Chiang: A Stranger to Words
• ·        Jeremiah Teipen: Ice Cubes Melting in a Plastic Cup
• ·        Poyen Wang: A Fabricated Personal History
• ·        Chinchih Yang: Kill Me or Change
• ·        Rosalie Yu and Alon Chitayat: Skin Deep

Meng Chih Chiang

A Stranger to Words, 2013-2017

HD projection, with color and sound, running time 4 minutes 51 seconds

Technical support: Yu-Cheng Lin, Alice Chen, Vick Hsieh Score. Composer: Tzu-Ho Lin

A Stranger to Words is a video based on a network graph created by Meng Chih Chiang to visualize her personal learning experience. Based on her daily reading report, a personal database of 23,358 words was created to express how she understood words. The complicated graph evolves a great diversity of transformations, creating a mesmerizing visual experience in which language and the line of connection work in unison. Its goal is to reveal a connecting system of underlying text algorithm in a novel and insightful way and to unfold personal sentiments through the capabilities of data visualization. As an English dyslexic, Meng Chih Chiang explores the relationship between language and people with language-based learning disabilities. By recording thousands of daily words for about one year, Chiang built a huge individual data set to make invisible reading progress visible and to reveal the novel perspectives of learning a second language in the experimental interface. Through this process Chiang realized that a tedious learning experience can become a source of inspiration. She wishes to transform the suffering of depression and frustration into a fantastic and imaginative production.  http://www.astrangertowords.com/

Meng Chih Chiang is a Taiwanese digital designer, data artist, and writer based in New York. Chiang was born in Pingtung, Taiwan, and earned her BFA in Visual Communication Design at National Taiwan Normal University. Upon graduating, Chiang was hired as a web designer at Medialand, one of the top digital design agencies in Taiwan. In 2013 she graduated from School of Visual Arts in New York and earned the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for exceptional achievement in Computer Art. At the School of Visual Arts, Chiang concentrated on interactive art of interfaces, infographics, programming, and internet. Chiang’s artwork A Stranger to Words has won the Red Dot Award, Macao Design Biennial Award, The Lumen Prize, Adobe Design Achievement Award, and Google Chrome Experiments, and has been featured in exhibitions worldwide. Chiang continues her career as a creative designer and an interactive designer at American Express and Hi-Res! in New York. Meanwhile, she founded Mengdom Experimental Design Lab to keep exploring big data and new technologies in arts.

Jeremiah Teipen

Ice Cubes Melting in a Plastic Cup, 2015

HD video projection, color with sound, running time 5 minutes

http://www.teipen.com/jeremiah/

Ingesting information that is both highly compacted and immediate is fundamentally changing our perception. Our increased and accelerated access to information, which has alleviated the pain and boredom of the process of searching and gathering, has been replaced with a new distress, that of dealing with such a large amount of data and analyzing its quality. For this we develop new tools and technology that have such high organizational power that they pose a potential danger to eliminate the accidental and serendipitous. However, consuming information at high speed and from multiple points-of-view simultaneously allows us to perceive interconnectedness of diverse media and form creative misinterpretations (mutations) of singular elements as well as their interrelationships. By doing so, one can form new concepts that transcend the current limitations of the physical/virtual paradigm. The intersection of these concepts and spaces form a nexus that is the subject of much of Teipen’s work.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Jeremiah Teipen currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Teipen received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design, has been the recipient of several awards including grants from the Asian Cultural Council, SIGGRAPH, Seoul Foundation of Arts & Culture and Arts Council Korea. He has exhibited his work in numerous exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Poyen Wang

 A Fabricated Personal History, 2017

Computer animation, color with sound, 2k, running time 4 minutes

In Poyen Wang’s project, A Fabricated Personal History, he examines the issues of identity and image authenticity in relation to digital technology by presenting a documentation of fake childhoods.

Wang collected footage of American home movies found on YouTube and recorded in the 1960s and 1970s and screen grabbed certain snapshot moments from these movies when the child in the video looks at the camera. Then he replaced the child’s face with his own at a similar age from family photos taken in Taiwan. The video borrows from algorithmic presentations like those employed by social media, replacing lived experiences with fabricated memories.

This series of manipulated childhood photos constructs an extensive personal archive, derived from collective memories circulated on the Internet. This questions our conceptions of reality and illustrates a digitization of identity. The uncanny atmosphere of the project's imagery suggests a sense of cultural rupture resulting from pressures to conform to American culture.

Born in 1987 in Taichung, Taiwan and based in New York, Poyen Wang is a conceptual media artist interested in experimental animation and video art. He focuses on time-based media that incorporate immersive installation with computer animation, using both still and moving images. His work has been shown at museums, galleries and film festivals nationally and internationally. Wang has a background in Graphic Design, received an MFA in New Media Art from Taipei National University of the Fine Arts in Taiwan, and is currently pursuing a second MFA in Computer Art through the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Chin Chih Yang

Kill Me or Change, 2012-1016

HD projection, color with sound, running time 5 minutes

Presented at the Queens Museum of Art New York 2012 & Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei 2016

In Chin Chih Yang’s interactive performance art piece Kill Me Or Change, 30,000 aluminum cans—the average number of cans one person throws away over a lifetime—are contained in a mesh net suspended 30 feet above the ground from a crane. As the finale to each performance, the contents of the net are released onto Yang’s head, in a colorful and overwhelming display of aluminum waste. By showing, quite literally, the suffocating effects of one person’s personal polluting, Yang hopes this piece will serve as a call to action, and that audience members and the public at large will examine their habits of personal consumption. 

Yang was born in Taiwan, and has resided for many years in New York City, where he studied at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design. He has received many fellowships; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has granted him a Swing Space residency at Governors Island. Yang’s interests in ecology and constructed environments have resulted in interactive performances and installations in the United States, Poland, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. His work incorporates the rhythms and discords of human society, correlating them with materials discarded by industrialized society. Finding the modern world both disturbing and entrancing, he aims to capture the complex state of anxiety and compulsive fascination specific to the contemplation of contemporary social problems. His performances often dramatize the divided quality of the self, and he uses video projections to create a discordant ambience.

Rosalie Yu & Alon Chitayat

Skin Deep, 2015

HD projection, body scanning, hand drawn textures, running time 5 minutes

Music by Aaron Arntz, T.K. Broderick, and Justin Peak

https://vimeo.com/114555862

Skin Deep is a series of collaborative self-portraits for which the body is treated as a canvas for 3D drawing. It is an exploration of a new kind of drawing format where the artists are 3D-scanned to produce a mesh of their bodies and texture maps of their skin from all angles. Skin Deep explores the core value of one’s self after peeling away layers of consciousness to reveal vulnerability, and how this transformation provides a new way of seeing.

Rosalie Yu is a visual designer, creative coder and maker. Her work draws inspiration from the fields of cognitive science, storytelling, art, and technology, and spans multiple artistic platforms including interactive installation, live performance and conceptual art.  She strives to incorporate narratives in her art in order to explore the connection of emerging 3D technologies to our daily lives and to bridge human and machine intelligence. Yu graduated from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.  She holds a BA in psychology and film from UCLA.

Alon Chitayat (Israel – US) is a digital artist and founder of Animishmish Creative Studio , which explores the intersection of video and interactivity. His artistic work has been exhibited at international venues, including ARS Electronica Festival (2010), Siggraph Festival (2011). Chitayat graduated from the Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU. His research concentrates on the study of drawing as a means for interaction.