Reflecting on his curatorial projects in China and elsewhere, Zhang Ga invokes some of the fundamental concepts developed in Deleuze’s extensive work on cinema to extend the discussion of “movement image” and “time image” into the digital now. He argues that movement image is timelapse — unfolding narratives that are representational — while timecollapse signals a shift to time image (under the technological construct of timespace), forcing upon us a presentation as expression of total time. In this vortex of permutation in which new subjects emerge and new narratives surface, new media art assumes a decisive role in articulating and constructing contemporary cultural experiences that call into question the ocularcentric aesthetic paradigm predicated on anthropocentric subjectivity and representation.
ZHANG Ga is a media art curator, Professor at the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University (Beijing), and Associate Professor of Media Art at the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design (New York). He also holds appointments as consulting curator of media art at the National Art Museum of China and senior researcher at the Media + Design Lab of EPFL | Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, and was a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Among numerous curatorial projects, he was artistic director / curator of Synthetic Times: International New Media Art Exhibition 2008 (catalogue by the MIT Press), a Beijing Olympics Cultural Project, and Translife: International Triennial of New Media Art 2011 (catalogue by Liverpool University Press), both organized by the National Art Museum of China. From 2004 to 2006, together with Prof. Lu Xiaobo he organized and curated the First, Second and Third Beijing International New Media Art Exhibitions and Symposiums, extending the global new media art discourse into mainland China. In 2010, he founded TASML, Tsinghua University Art & Science Research Center Media Lab.
The ATC series is produced by the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), with support from the Office of the Vice Chancellor and Provost, the Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), Meyer Sound and Theo Armour.