Digital timepieces

Jin Jiangbo's installation Online Chat addresses the pressure brought about by information technology.

An on-going media art show at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing offers viewers some food for thought about time.

Entitled Time-lapse, the philosophically-charged media art exhibition examines the fundamentals of digital media, including the concept of time and space, memory and their representations, according to curator Zhang Ga.

Time-lapse is a photographic technique in which pictures are taken at long intervals between each frame, creating an illusion of real-time movement when synchronized at a 24-frame-per-second playback speed.

The 14 installations "not only challenge conventional perceptions of media but also traditional ways of thinking in the Internet age," says National Art Museum of China dean Fan Di'an.

For instance, Chen Shaoxiong's digital videotaping activities have resulted in an overwhelming amount of footages, hence the huge, mixed-media installation Visible and Invisible, Known and Unknown.

Standing at the entrance to the exhibition, on the fifth floor of the museum, the work is composed of Chen's miniature ink drawings of daily objects and urban scenes, hung alongside elevated, circular, multilevel tracks, resembling a highway system full of billboard advertisements.

A model train with a pinhole camera mounted on its head records ink drawings as it crisscrosses the simulated urban scenes.

Through this work, Chen says he intends to create a real time animation of imagery, a narrative that "awakens the visitor's sensibilities impeded by excessive loudness and overbearing images".

The National Art Museum of China dean Fan Di'an (left) viewing Arthur Clay's installation, Horroom.

In her vivid orchestra/noise installation, Harddisko, Swiss artist Valentina Vuksic takes viewers on a journey to a parallel universe. The musician and media artist has collected used or defective hard disc drives to create a unique installation: Each hard disc drive's casing is removed and a sound pickup is mounted on the drive's reading head and connected to a sound mixer. The alignment of a dozen or more hard discs eventually takes a metal, sculptural form.

When the disc drives are powered up they activate sounds which vary due to the different manufacturing processes, model types, production series, firmware versions, and each disc's history. To the audience, these disc drives look like DJs and sound like a miniature disco.

"These obsolete disc drives are date sediment. She excavates time buried and resuscitates memory fossilized, not to revive life, but to recount a machine history," Zhang says.

"Time is no longer perception because it is hard evidence in electrical pulses, in magnetic wheezing, and in metallic residues."

In his eye-catching installation Online Chat, Jin Jiangbo addresses the pressure brought about by information technology.

His work creates a scene in which a young man resembling the artist, collapses at a desk, surrounded by laptops, each offering the viewers multitudes of Web pages, on-line chat texts, and Internet news.

"The installation is a reflection of my life and my relationship with the Internet: Every day I feel a pressure imposed by new technologies such as the Internet and mobile communication; I cannot escape from them and indeed my life would be difficult and unbearable without electronica, such as laptops and mobile phones," Jin says.