Underwater Zombie Frog Ballet: Frog Corpses Dance Via MIDI Control

Among the eight artists selected for the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art’s first major exhibition of 2012 is one of our favorite new media artists, Lu Yang, who was previously featured on our blog.

The center’s Becoming Peninsula I: Symptoms is an exhibition exploring a generation of artists who grew up in an environment in which access to information rapidly expanded under completely redefined values. Yang’s contribution to the show, Reanimation! Underwater Zombie Frog Ballet!, is an HD music video of dead frogs dancing to a spooky electronic soundtrack.

The frogs bodies, or at least the halves of their bodies that are being used, are suspended in water and controlled via MIDI controller. Triggering different drum sounds on the controller causes different frogs to twitch along with the beat. Yang, who is deeply fascinated by everything from electronic music to theology, often combines organic experiments with new media technologies to test the audience’s nerves. In this exhibition, we see one of her earlier works.

Lu Yang studied under Zhang Peili and travels between Tokyo and Shanghai.

If you’re in Beijing and you’d like to check out the show, here is the info.

Open: March 3, 2012 – April 3, 2012
Venue: Iberia Center for Contemporary Art
Address: E06, 798 Art Zone, 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing