China and India Converge
Claudia Albertini
Perhaps one of the most interesting, paradoxical and predictable aspects of technological "revolution" is the extent to which we can associate it with philosophy. Indeed, art, science and metaphysics seem to be, in these days, re-running their embryonic stages to meet that shared nucleus of investigation and thinking from which they were generated. Art expressions seem to go back and forth between technology and tradition to create a language made of new tools. Technology investigates its realm to better interpret and accomplish human needs and their aesthetic mechanisms. Metaphysics tries to discern from reality and materiality and provide an outer explanation to existence and its intrinsic facets. In this perspective, artistic creation can be seen as the ultimate assemblage and product of an encounter between different ways of seeing the world.
Although India and China had relatively little political contact before the 50s, their historical intercourse records extensive cultural exchange since the first century AD, starting with the transmission of Buddhism. Through their spiritual conversation, the "two brothers of Asia" (from the Hindi Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai) seemed to have thus created a transcultural bridge. Today, India and China, following rapid developments and progresses in digital techniques, are reinventing their positions in a new world setting while showing their eagerness to work together on an artistic, and also somewhat philosophical response to the so-called "Information Age."
Based on an acknowledgment of the forces of a mass-media oriented consumer society, of the transnational circulation of people, technologies, commodities and ideas of the 21st Century, the two countries bring forth a new project: "Beijing-Background." Their encounter, based on social values and the relationships within a centralized society, aims to offer a new independent artistic environment, a sort of "state-of-the-art." In 2006, the two countries’ artistic communities will attempt to rekindle ancient philosophical links and supplement this with a technological exchange. The project, created and organized by the CKS (an Indian centre for knowledge and social researches) together with Yao Bin (11-art.com, Beijing) aims to combine the two countries’ artistic traditions through the means of new media technologies. These tools will try to preserve an under-the-line philosophical message. In spring 2006 artists from India and China will be invited to Beijing to take part in an ongoing workshop whose purpose is the creation of new art pieces through the usage of innovative tools. Through their works, digital media artists will endeavour to offer a future open space in which to express their response to science, technology and the life sciences.
Yao Bin says, "In these recent years, the world of media art has been trying to combine biology–which is the centre of science of the 21st Century–with electronic technology." Art is now seeking to find a way of interpretation and representation of the ecliptic combination between our lives and the new social environment. Once the destinations for a transmission of the spiritual, India and China will shortly appear in the "Beijing-Background" event as the transmitters of an encounter between the metaphysical and the technological. The artists invited will attempt to mirror tradition and future; they will indicate the point of juncture of different expressions of art, as spiritual forces of representation and as evidences of today’s achievements. The fast changes taking places in the two Asian societies, the rapid developments of life sciences and biotechnologies of the 21st Century, are the most important issues concerning our lives today. Mahatma Gandhi said in 1952: "Science without humanity is one of the seven social sins." Perhaps, if science and technology abandon themselves and concentrate only on the achievement of knowledge, this will result in the gradual loss of their morality and humanity.
"Beijing Background" hopes to bring to the stage new media works that use new technologies, such as life science and biotechnology. The artists’ responses to the actual studies aim also to offer a new social background for people, while the event’s peculiarity lays in the artists’ medium, whose substance partly consists of living organisms. The artists will thus bring forth new ideas and, at the same time, portray traditional icons, such as those from the Buddhist tradition. In these thorough pieces of art that combine Chinese and Indian flavours, Buddhism, as a way of thinking and hence a philosophy, will therefore meet the advance of technology and biotechnology.
