Forever Virtual

2024.12.29 Sunday 19:00

Location

Xiangsun studio,F4, 117 Pingwu Road, Changning District, Shanghai

Speaker: Cao Jiamin

In the digit-mediated quotidian, what does it mean to touch? This performative lecture explores the faculty of touch, investigating the development of the primitive sensation into haptics—“the science of touches”— and its shift from the laboratory to the digital interface. The lecture also intends to reveal the technology inherent in this modality while further delineating the reality reassembled through the mediation of touch from finger counting to clicking and scaling on (virtual) interfaces. Amid countless attempts to approach and grasp—a perpetual pursuit of intimacy that remains elusive—what new fiction might touch enable us to connect with?

 

About the Speaker: CAO Jiamin

CAO Jiamin works on writing, translating and curatorial practices engaged with digital media technologies that shapes the contemporary social-cultural discourse, investigating the potentials of artistic-research-oriented methodologies in the intersecting area of art and technology.

 

About the Vortex:

VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.

The Macalline Center of Art (MACA) is a non-profit art institution located in the 798 Art District of Beijing and officially inaugurated its space on January 15, 2022. Occupying a two-story building with a total area of 900 square meters, MACA unites artists, curators, and other art and cultural practitioners from around the world. Through its diverse, ongoing, and collaborative approaches, the Center establishes a new site on the contemporary art scene. Guided by the “work of artists” and backed by interdisciplinary research, the Center aims to bring together a community passionate about art and devoted to the “contemporary” moment so as to respond proactively to our rapidly evolving times.