TRANSMISSION ART ARCHIVE
Cultural Morphing
Klaus Filip / Nicolaj Kirisits / et al.
Cultural Morphing is an experiment in creating a multi-perspective image of reality from the simultaneous experience of a geographic line by the individual expression of a perceived personal reality. Twelve invited artists traveled by train from Vienna to Shanghai, and selected stops along the route served as their workspace where they would meticulously work out an project that outlined various aspects of cultural transition experienced on the journey. Stopovers at Ulan-Ude, Ulan Bator, Beijing and Shanghai were used to exhibit the works that were created en route.
China emerged as the focus and destination for Cultural Morphing because of the mutual, cooperative, and also oppositional status of digital art between China and Europe. Europe and China are two antipodes in cultural history that have been in steady interchange, but have also developed differently and independently from each other. This cultural deviation is the starting point and the ultimate potential of our project. Adequate to the technology of morphing, the realization of the individual artworks will be a consummation of the artistic interpretations of many keyframes on the tracks between Vienna and Shanghai.
The broadcast for Radius will feature a score developed through filming a dinner at a Chinese rotating table. The images captured through filming from above the table during the course of the dinner were sonified with data and acoustic recordings collected along the journey. The artists involved created individual sound files based on a video score that were later combined into one stereo track. -Reprinted from Radius.