Digital art comes to Sanlitun

MORTAL ENGINE, 2008, seen here with performer Antony Hamilton.

Anita Fontaine constructs complex, constantly  shifting artwork.

Daniel Crooks' piece stretches and compacts  time and space.

This September, Dream Worlds - Australian Moving Image 2010, a digital exhibition curated by Melinda Rackham, brings art to The Village at Sanlitun.

Dream Worlds is just one of the many events that make up Imagine Australia, a year-long festival of performances, exhibitions, concerts and forums, to be held all over China. It presents the moving images of eight leading Australian artists, each two to six minutes long, which run together uninterrupted for half an hour every hour on the large screen above the Piazza in The Village.

As Dream Worlds travels through one artist's work to the next, viewers will see a wide spectrum of new media at play on the 27-m x 7.5-m screen, including video art, generative software, electronic manipulations, games engine modifications, dance choreography and cinematic imagery. Through their own methods and visions, the artists impress upon the viewer their personal insights into Australia.

"For the most part, Australia really is still quite an unknown culture and an exotic destination for most of the rest of the world," says Rackham. "And I have assembled this show to bring some of that uniqueness for a more intimate engagement in China."

Creating Dream Worlds has been a year in the making, and finding the right location has been the job of producer Michael Yuen.

"I wanted a place that wasn't aligned with the other art spaces in Beijing, which are largely market-driven," he says. "This isn't what we're trying to do, we're not selling anything. We're trying to make art relevant in an urban location."

So while, paradoxically, Dream Worlds couldn't be set in a more commercial piece of real estate, it will be directly in the sights of the young, creative youth it hopes to inspire.

Well-respected art curator and director of Pkin Fine Arts Meg Maggio agrees the Sanlitun screen makes a well-matched platform for the exhibition.

"Sanlitun's The Village is a great place to show contemporary digital art on the large-format outdoor public screen," she says. "Because of massive audience size, especially in the warm weather where The Village becomes an urban park of sorts, with huge visitor numbers day and night, seven days a week This fulfills all of our aims to broaden the appreciation for contemporary art beyond small art circles to a more general audience."

The works touch on universal themes: intimacy, isolation or the imaginary. There is the hypnotic Aqueous Trace, by Jess MacNeils, which traces the splashing of swimmers in an ocean pool in Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Mortal Engine, by dance company Chunky Move, combines inspirational dance choreography with laser and video imagery, as well as interactive computer engineering systems that allow instruments and bodies to respond to each other in real time. The three-minute Samson and Delilah, from indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton, explores two teenagers falling in love, subtly executed without a word being spoken between them. Anita Fontaine's Knightshift, likely to appeal to the young gamers in the crowd, uses a stunning patchwork of video game imagery to build a modern jousting spectacle.

"It tries to imagine what goes on inside video games when no one is looking or playing them," Fontaine explains. "I want my work to give people a magical feeling, transporting them into a romantic world if only for a few minutes."