Hyundai Blue Prize2023
Decentralized Reworlding
We are living in these unprecedented times even though a post-pandemic return to normality is in sight. The repercussions of the pandemic are like a butterfly effect, causing unpredictable changes in all fields. The Hyundai Blue Prize 2023 will nurture the creative and critical forms of re-worlding through the arts, technology, and humanities that must be in action to sustain our decentralized life. The relationship between individual and collective, everyday life and the macro environment, technology and humanity is facing ever-changing challenges and urgently needs to be re-understood and redefined. One of the paradoxical consequences, for instance, is that social distancing has given rise to further rapid adoption of remote and virtual engagement, yet we are also more eager than ever for intimate connections. Meanwhile, the accelerating private industry space race is expanding our perspective on the territories of mankind to encompass outer space. At the same time, it makes us want to reexamine the crucial systems that are needed support our life on this planet.
The Hyundai Blue Prize has a history of critically examining how to improve human habitation and life through art and technology. In 2021, under the theme of “Resonant Cities,” the Prize interrogated how we might create more sustainable and inclusive cities through awareness of the emotional and affective experience of their inhabitants. In 2022, the Prize reflected upon the urgency of the present and critically engaged with disruptive technologies in order to envision possible futures under the theme of “Disruptive Futures.”
In a bold new initiative, the Hyundai Blue Prize 2023 will encourage investigation of the complexity of the social system and rethinking the current boundaries of our social norms and human territories. The aim is to imagine new possibilities for re-worlding in the era of the metaverse, distributed networks, decentralized economies, and generative, responsible AI.
Winner
CHEN Jianghong & LI Zheng
"Animal Farm" written by the British writer George Orwell depicted a vivid portrait of animals after the human farmers were driven away. The story not only reveals the normal state of social development, but also has rich ecological implications. In this post-pandemic era, the story also makes us want to think more from an ecological perspective about how humans and other beings will seek coexistence and co-prosperity. The exhibition intends to rebuild an "Animal Farm Simulator" and this exploration is not about making a subversive change, but an optimization and improvement beyond "Anthropocentrism". The exhibition consists of four sections: the WORKSHOP, the LAB, the ARENA and the CO-OP, simulating a future experimental field where humans and multi-species jointly owned. In this field full of infinite possibilities and imagination, from the “IT” perspective, we make productions, practices, creations and speculations in the "New Animal Farm", to explore how humans could coexist with other beings on this beautiful planet we share.
ZONG Xiao
We are in the midst of vast changes in both social and ecological changes. Exponential growth in technology coerces us to move further into uncertainty. A decentralized world is destined to fail if we place our hope on technology alone, because the decentralization driven by capital would ultimately become a false one with shifting centers as its camouflage. It is essential that we start the process from our own perspective – a non-human perspective, to imagine and accept the “invasion” of other species, as well as to embrace a symbiotic or coexistent system between human and nonhuman.
The exhibition encourages the viewers to use “Metamorphosis” as a method to transform the self as well as to interrogate the relationship between ourselves and other species: apart from opposition and competition, we also have transformation, transposition, diffusion and interdependence. Metamorphosis helps with cross-species connection, which builds up the foundation of true decentralization. The artists in this exhibition invite viewers to explore and speculate with them, and the title of the show, Metamorphic Ecosphere aims at encouraging people to adopt the new perspective provided by Metamorphosis, and to rethink and rebuild our current ecosystem.
Jury Review
Finalists
Junior Juries
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Nikita Yingqian Cai
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DONG Bingfeng
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HUANG Sunquan
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JIANG Yuhui
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LI Jie
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Carol Yinghua Lu
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Vivian Xu
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ZHANG Lie
Senior juries
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FEI Jun
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Joel Ferree
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HOU Hanru
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Christiane Paul
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Stephanie Rosenthal
Symposium
Hyundai Blue Prize Art+Tech 2023 online curation symposium invited 3 experts to exchange their valuable experience and different understanding of art and technology with the five groups of shortlisted curators providing more international vision and cutting-edge trends.
Roddy Schrock
Building, Not Forgetting
Roddy Schrock is an arts organizer and curator. He regularly juries and nominates for national and international art awards. During the seminar, Roddy Schrock shared his opinions about how the past artists present social dilemmas at that time when talked about the several artists he has known over the past 15 years. Why should people today be forced into the metaverse? Why should the ownership of personal information be put in the hands of technology companies when people acquire the survival tools? Roddy Schrock explores the ways we interact with the digital world through thinking about the physical world and the imaginary world created by Silicon Valley technology companies, calling for the return of the inclusive, sharing and decentralized Internet spirit.
Kathleen Forde
Curating Time
Kathleen Forde is the inaugural senior curator for Superblue. In the seminar, she shared how to think about “time” when developing the curation combined with Superblue. As a time-mediated curator, Kathleen Forde shared her curatorial practice in the field of art and media. As the senior curator of Superblue, she’s mainly responsible for providing supports to the artists who work on large-scale experiential art, performative installations and immersive work projects. Kathleen Forde introduced the two cooperation modes of Superblue, and shared four curatorial principles with the theme of "time", combining the work experience of Superblue: dramaturgy, travel and pilgrimage, shared experience of continuity, and performance platform.
Hyunjung Woo
Project Hashtag At The Halfway Point
Hyunjung Woo is a curator of MMCA (the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) with an extensive experience in curating and researching art. She has been previously served as a senior researcher at the Korea National Research Center for art at the Korea National University of Arts and a senior editor of the SPACE magazine focusing on design and architecture. In the seminar, Woo shared the overall introduction of Hashtag competition, the achievements of previous exhibitions and the project she’s currently preparing for this year. She believed that Hashtag can enrich the presentation way of art exhibition, work creativity and promotion process, and open up a new way of art exhibition. Woo introduced the theme, background and exhibition scheme of 3 Hashtag's award-winning exhibitions in detail.
THE ANIMAL FARM SIMULATOR 2023.04.28～2023.10.08
THE ANIMAL FARM SIMULATOR
This is a story that takes place in the future, you can imagine yourself opening an anywhere door. In this imaginative world, some human beings follow the naturalism of Lao Tzu and Rousseau. They live in the natural environment, and constantly reflect on anthropocentrism. While some others, who lost in the confrontation with artificial intelligence and are manipulated by the ever-accelerating technology. They hid in artificial illusions, implanted micrologic chips into their organs, used themselves as biological batteries, and let digital signals took over their thinking. Historians tell us that humans are no longer the masters of the world, and that anthropocentrism has become a fossilized line of code in the "human data strata" in the cyber library. New theories of natural animism began to rise, and an ideological trend of "decentralized reworlding" was also emerging. People constantly reflect on the relationship between man and all beings in the world, and explore how to achieve optimization and improvement of "anthropocentrism". In this context, a brand new "Animal Farm Simulator" has been established and just opened to public. A series of discussions on the way of coexistence between human beings and all beings are also being carried out here. This time, can we eliminate the confrontation between human beings and other species, explore a new mode of coexistence, cooperation, mutualism, coexistence and prosperity under the premise of understanding and respect, and write a new chapter of the “Animal Farm” together? The “Animal Farm Simulator” consists of four sections: the Workshop, the Lab, the Arena and the Co-op, simulating a future experimental field where all beings co-exist, presenting the thinking and exploration of future possibilities. In this mixed field full of infinite imagination, from the “IT” perspective, we produce, practice, co-create and speculate in the "New Animal Farm" and constantly exploring ways to share this beautiful planet with other lives.
Metamorphic Ecosphere 2023.11.04 - 2024.05.05
Metamorphic Ecosphere
The world we live in is undergoing dramatic transformations. On the one hand, geopo-litical tension is escalating, the global economy is regressing, and energy and food crises are on the rise. On the other hand, ecosystems are deteriorating as the climate becomes fickler and natural catastrophes more commonplace. Meanwhile, technolo-gies are seeing exponential growth—artificial intelligence, lab-grown organ transplants, brain-machine interfaces, and other technologies once exclusive to the realm of sci-fi are no longer remote to us. As capital and technologies coerce us to keep moving, we are now entering a state of schizophrenia: at once ecstatic for the revolutions that could be heralded by cutting-edge technologies and anxious aboutthe possibility that we’re booking a one-way ticket to a dystopian future. Against this backdrop, theories and practices of “decentralization” have become a means to reflect on and confront existing socio-economic structures by encouraging us to consider and envision alternative sociological and ecological orders. Such practices emphasize anti-anthropocentrism, equality between species, and cohabita-tion and solidarity with other species. But how do we humans take our first step towards a decentralized world? How can we begin to imagine a reality where all species are treated as equals? Metamorphic Ecosphere proposes metamorphosis as a methodology—for human-kind’s introspection, for analyzing the economic and ecological structures that we find ourselves in, and for examining the inequalities that manifest through “voluntary” and “forced” metamorphoses. Perhaps only through conceiving and welcoming the metamorphoses of our bodies, living spaces, and ecosystems can we truly embrace the “encroachment” of other species and substances—and, in turn, stride towards a decentralized world. The word “metamorphic” has multiple meanings. In geology, it refers to the physical and chemical “mutations” that rocks undergo when subjected to heat, pressure, and other agencies; In biology, metamorphosis describes the changes in bodily form as an organism develops into maturity; In computer science, a metamorphic code is a malicious program that constantly rewrites itself, and through such self-transforma-tion it evades the detection of anti-virus programs. Metamorphic Ecosphere branches off from the plural meanings of the “metamorphic” to inspire meditations on the voluntary and forced metamorphoses that humans, other species, and myriad substances go through in the current technological era, in our planetary metabolic system. We thereby probe the extent of change that we’re willing to accept and begin to question whether the anthropocentric beliefs we hold will ultimately consume us.