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Deconstructing Functionality: Meet UFO Media Lab and MeatMedia

Artists Wu Juehui and Shao Ding discuss their experimental artworks.

These days technology is inescapable, so you might as well immerse yourself in what it has to offer and use it to your benefit. At least, that’s the reasoning behind the work ethic of Chinese artists Wu Juehui and Shao Ding, who head up UFO Media Lab and “virtual lab” MeatMedia — two different art organizations that compliment each other, calling together artists and technologists to work and explore the social applications of technology through experimental and R&D projects.

Both Juehui and Ding have a theatre background, and they incorporate some of the tricks they learnt from that trade in their installations, building on their theatrical foundation to create works that filter the experience of technology through performance, spectacle, and architectural forms. The difference between UFO Media Lab and MeatMedia, Wu explained to us, is that “UFO Media Lab takes concepts, prototypes and technical theories developed by MeatMedia, and turns them into social, public or commercial artworks.” Whether that be site-specific work or experimental pieces like their collaboration with Vega Zaishi Wang for The Creators Project, the intergalactic fashion show Alpha Lyrae.

MeatMedia, the nonprofit counterpart of UFO is initiated by new media artists. Their output is more conceptual and self-expressive by members including residency artists, engineers, designers and programers, who all experiment together. MeatMedia’s cross-disciplinary practice often joins forces with research academies such as Tsinghua University’s The Institute of Neural Engineering, producing artworks such as the Brain Station 2. The headset features a lightbulb affixed to a helmet that’s controlled by the wearer’s brainwaves. “The purpose was to deconstruct the usual function of things.” Juehui says of the piece in the video above. “With these projects we rediscover our conditions.”

The pair are happy to use whatever technology it takes to rediscover these conditions, as long as they can present their audience, and the uninitiated, with a fresh way of seeing the world—and art. “There is a lot of space for media art to grow.” notes Juehui, “It’s a very broad idea. It’s also necessary and meaningful to introduce it to the general public so people can recognize its vitality and freshness.”