Object-Subjectivities : a Techno-Art Saga (an interactive digital chronology)

Data visualisation and interaction using Process, the work contains 300+ slides with images presented on an 8-metre long wall projection navigated by 4 programmed digital joystick consoles.
Object-Subjectivities: a Techno-art Saga is a curatorial statement in the form of an artwork. It is an 8m long interactive digital chronology mapping all the14 artworks in the show Algorithmic Art: Shuffling Space and Time (27 Dec 2018 - 10 Jan 2019, City Hall Exhibition Hall, Hong Kong, curated by Linda Lai) onto a broader history of art and technology, based on assumptions in media archaeology. The making of this chronology adaptively combines Erkki Huhtoma’s topos study approach, and Siegfried Zielinski’s “deep time” perspective, built into Lai’s ongoing experiments with notation systems and chronological visualization. In Huhtoma’s terms, topos study emphasizes “cyclically repeated motifs and processes, but does not deny progress,” and each artwork in the show is the focal point of a topos, such a work can imaginably form a unique landscape with the individual artist’s ongoing practices. The varied assembled landscapes of the 14 artworks in this show together accumulate into a geography for topoi analysis, attending to recurring discursive concepts, visual or audio, that can be traced cross-historically and, to various extents, cross-culturally. Lai finds such a broad view emphasis compatible with what Zielinski would call “deep time,” which is a distributive model, looking at objects and events (i.e. “media attractions” as he calls it) that are plottable on a chronology system equally as much as the vast silences and blankness of what is in between points. The chronology presented here marks an initial step in examining the “dynamics between continuity and change” and attempts a deeper more interconnected understanding of past traces of media art situated in Hong Kong. Visitors can access the data nodes on the point-line graphical map using a wireless joystick set, and explore the links in whatever way their curiosity leads them.