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An Immersive Look Inside Shanghai's First New Media Arts Center

Featuring lectures, residencies, and a 360-degree visualization environment, the Chronus Art Center is Shanghai's first non-profit art organization dedicated solely to new media art.

All images courtesy of theChronus Art Center

When the Chronus Art Center opened in Shanghai last year, its ambitions seemed immense; situated smack between two major ShanghART buildings, the 836 square meter warehouse, slated to host four major exhibiions and seminars a year in Shanghai’s M50 art district, boasts its role as “the first non-profit art organization in China to focus on new media art.”

Like Medialab-Prado in Madrid, the New Museum’s NEW INC in New York, and the Gray Area Foundation in San Francisco, the Chronus Art Center seeks to give new media artists a space in China for their ideas to gestate, manifest, and thrive. While it’s not the only venue in China that spotlights the new media artists in the country, it’s the first to exist outside of museum and university settings.

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Pioneering Chinese new media artist, and one of the CAC’s founders, Hu Jieming says the demand for new media art in China is significant, and requires more than just exhibition space. “The biggest challenge comes from our own level of knowledge of media art, and how to manage the appearance and development of art works on a totally new media platform. We’re also aiming to maximize [the CAC’s] significance and possibilities in public life and interactive situation[s].”

Clips from LA DISPERSION DU FILS (1999-2014), created by Jean Michel Bruyère, Matthew McGinity, Delphine Varas, and Thierry Arredondo.

From T_Visionarium (2008) by Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Matt McGinity, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel

Its current exhibition is a strong testimony to that aim: part of a double bill that features Overture, and Taichi, two new installations by Jieming himself, the CAC’s summer show is a retrospective surrounding Jeffrey Shaw’s high-tech Advanced Visualization and Interaction Environment (AVIE), a 13-foot-high, 33-foot-wide arena of panels that, according to the website for Shaw’s Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of New South Wales, is the world’s first “360-degree stereoscopic immersive interactive visualization system.” The AVIE includes multi-channel audio and motion tracking systems, and with five projectors all operating on custom image processing technologies, motion sensors installed throughout are able to accurately track the movements of up to 30 people. Alongside Jieming’s works, 16 artists and art groupswill use the AVIE as a digital canvas until the end of November.

Overture (2014), by Hu Jieming

Rendering image of Taichi (2014) by Hu Jieming

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This is the fourth exhibition hosted at the CAC thus far, and the inclusion of these marquee artists have made it one of the most significant; each has made, and continues to make contributions to the evolution of 21st Century new media art. As world-class museums reformat their exhibition spaces and create unique portals for curation and archiving, through their demonstrated commitment to new media art, the CAC may very well one day be China’s beacon for the amorphous art genre.

Keep up with news, ongoing residencies, and more over at the CAC’s website.

Follow Johnny Magdaleno on Twitter: @johnny_mgdlno

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