| |
November 30, 2006 – January 13, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 30th 6-8pm
SHU LEA CHEANG
Babylove
A mobile network installation
http://www.babylove.biz (upload
love songs for babies)
The Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, is pleased
to announce the opening of a new exhibition called, Baby
Love, developed by celebrated Taiwanese artist, Shu
Lea Cheang. The exhibition runs from December 1, 2006 to January
13, 2007. A press briefing will be held on Wednesday 29, November,
from noon to 2 pm.
Baby Love is a wifi mobile installation
that consists of 6 large autonomously mobile teacups (67 inches
in diameter) with 6 clone babies (each 28 inches tall). The teacups
are modeled after spinning carnival rides, except that the soundtrack
of love songs can be uploaded by public via the web at http://babylove.biz
and directly to the teacups, where they are coded as ME (memory
and emotion) data for the clone babies. When the museum visitor
takes a teacup ride with the babies, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled
and eventually crashes. Baby Love situates
human and baby clone riders in a perpetual spin which fuses the
familiar fairground iconography with contemporary “remix”
pop culture.
Baby Love is the second installment of
Shu Lea Cheang's Locker Baby Project which
also includes Baby Play (presented at
NTT[ICC], Tokyo in 2001) and Baby Work
(to be realized). Referring to Ryu Murakami's noted novel, Coin
Locker Babies (1980), the updated locker babies are born out
of Tokyo coin lockers by DPT (Dolly Polly Transgency) with genes
extracted from deep-sea pearls. The “biobot” locker
babies are the clone generation of our sci-fi fantasy reality, entrusted
to receive, store, transmit and negotiate human memory and emotions.
The teacups are modeled after the spinning teacup of the old-time
playground and as such have a somewhat nostalgic presence that collides
with the cloned baby. The baby adorned with a locker key, a LED
display with random locker numbers, is installed with a baby machine
(a Mac mini with 802.11 wifi connection). The spinning wheel on
the teacup is wired with sensors. The sensor data (direction and
speed) sent via RS 232 and 802.11 to the baby commands the baby
machine whose sound engine (written in MaxMSP), receives and processes
the MP3 database. When the teacup is in motion, its direction and
speed vary the shuffle and rearrange the love songs in the baby
engine. The teacup's bottom plate, inflated with a silicon tube,
encloses a circular strip of contact bumper so that the teacups
can safely bump into each other, in a gentler version of the fairground
bumper cars. When teacups collide, the baby engine is informed,
sound files are exchanged and remixed and played back into the web
stream.
In Baby Love, Shu Lea Cheang continues
her exploration of our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual
life of the internet and its impact on cultural practices. It is
an installation which mixes nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age
with the technically boggling interactive technology of the connections
on the net, Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers
of the web take us? Will it lead to an expanded universe of knowledge
or to a frightening scenario of dehumanization, where even the emotions
of a baby can be programmed at will?
Love songs can be uploaded, deposited, recycled for the clone babies
of the installation at http://babylove.biz where the viewer can
also find complete technical descriptions of the installation and
download images.
Baby Love was initially produced by the
National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts commission with support from
Council for Culture Affairs, Taiwan in collaboration with SQV Design
International, Tatung University, Mechanical Engineering department,
eLife Techonology Innovation Center, Sony Computer Science Laboratory
Paris. US exhibition liaison: Taipei Cultural Center [TECO], New
York.
 
For more information please contact:
Chris Longfellow
Press Officer
The Chelsea Art Museum
Chris@chelseaartmuseum.org
212-255-0719 x 108
|
