Shoot at the light

Shoot at the light,

Spiralling into glass-less window,

An explosion, a firework,

The snare drum tops it off,

Wine stained-lips,

Breath stinking in hot rooms,

Spewing declarations condemning

The fireworks party on the small black box,

Happening without them, it is their party.

Look into the light,

There is no no-where.

Sharpened edges of shaved metal cut sure lines

Making bodies ghostly scaffolds.

They appear in miniature,

Stretched out flat

Between the cracks,

Between the fizzing beams of sound and glare.

Av@r at CMoDA

Step into an exhibition that lets you create your own music videos, understand the art of gaming or play with artists’ music samples. Then watch artists do the same with software they’ve designed, building performance pieces that change at every show. 

Situated in the underground floor the China Millennium Monument is the new Chinese Museum of Digital Art (CMoDA). Their first exhibition is Av@r, a collaboration between the CMoDA team and London-based digital arts organization onedotzero. It is an impressive showcase for a wide range of pieces that exemplify the possibilities available to artists working with digital media. 

The title ‘Av@ar’ refers to an eruption in avatars and other new digital modes of expression in China. Avatars are, by their digital definition, online personalities, such as you might take on in Half-Life or other online games. The term stems from the Indian ‘avatar’, the earthly form of a divine being, suggesting power in disguise and other-worldliness.

In many of the works, audience and/or artists interact with the piece to transform it or create a completely new work. Jo Shallow, project manager and programmer at onedotzero, breaks one form this can take down for us. 'Quite a lot of digital artists use something called processing, which allows them to use maths and algorithms to create varying visual and sound pieces', she says. 

Take the interactive music video lounge consisting of six individual stations. As a member of the audience, you can play with moving visual images and soundtracks to create your own videos. Musicians such as Cornelius,Placebo, Jack White and OK Go are amongst the names who have collaborated with artists to create these projects, some of which are available online. You can make a three-stroke character (this can be anything, from the Japanese character ‘ah’ to a circle and two dots) dance across the screen to Cornelius’ chilled electronic beats or create a personalized message with OK Go, Pilobus and Trish Sie’s project All is not Lost (powered by Google Chrome). 


'At the station All is not Lost you can type in a message at the beginning of the video,’ says Shallow. ‘Then lots of different screens appear with people dancing. At the end the people dancing form to make your message, and you can email it to a friend.’  (check one of out ours).

‘The interactive music video lounge is the starting and end-point of the exhibition’, she says, (CMoDA is a circular building), and this demonstrates the importance of audience interaction throughout much of Av@r. Speaking to artist Simon Geilfus of artist collective AntiVJ, he confirmed this view is shared by digital artists. ‘I’d say …artists are excited at the prospect of loosing control of their work, and this makes it different from more traditional art forms which cannot do this to the same extent’.


The final piece in the exhibition is Stop iT by Lab212. ‘It’s got a timeline and a grid’, says Shallow. ‘You place different post-it notes on the grid which forms a projection on the wall, so you’re kind of making your own video. The audio track can be recorded by pressing a button – then it’s downloadable onto any computer. It’s really interesting to see what kind of music comes out of just one grid and five different post-it notes.'

The exhibition was opened with an audio-visual live performance by Canadian-born, Barcelona-based musician Murcof and Simon Geilfus. Murcof mixed simple melodic tracks underscored by textured and at times complex rhythms, while Geilfus worked with a set of images that stretched, contracted, multiplied and formed wonderfully beautiful and surprising shapes across a semi-transparent screen. These images in turn reverberated with and reacted to changes in the music’s pace and melody. Through the screen, it was possible to see the two artists as they worked. 


Not all the pieces in this exhibition contain musical elements, and their range is wide. Av@r features works by Matt Pyke, Francis Lam, Chinese director Zao Wang from the Creative China project, Wonwei, Guo Haoyun and many others.

Clare Pennington

Originally posted on Time Out Beijing