Hot Body, Cool Tech: Performative and Choreographed Bodies in New Media

I co-curated an exhibition entitled "Hot Body, Cool Tech: Performative and Choreographed Bodies in New Media" with Dr. I-Wen Chang for the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung. Hot Body, Cool Tech (HBCT) investigated how performative and choreographed bodies exist in an era of new media. The unique collection of digital video, interactive displays, and multimedia works in this exhibition prompted deeper thinking around the relationship between people and new technologies, to conceptualize performance, investigate the ways technology affects our understanding of human agency when theorizing the body, and define our humanness within a growing digital world, where machines are programmed to act like humans and humans are encouraged to perform like machines. The exhibition’s objectives and goals also focused on international, multilingual, multimodal, and hybrid locus representations. The call for exhibition proposals required applications that featured over 50% non-Taiwanese artists and artists that have not been previously exhibited in Taiwan. HBCT met these requirements and contained artists from around the world, including Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan.

The show introduced audiences to original contemporary digital art which provoked deep thinking around the role of the digital in daily life. As a collaborative project between curators, artists, and audience, HBCT deepened, fostered, and promoted the development of Taiwan and international standards for the field of digital arts. Encouraging interactive and immersive engagement through the selected art work and the companion website, the greater HBCT project offers people the chance to be more than viewers – it gives them an opportunity to participate and truly engage with the topic, the technology, and the art.