WF Central, the new premium “lifestyle and retail hub” on Wangfujing is hosting the Barbican-curated exhibition Digital Revolutionthrough May 20, 2018. Co-presented by the cityof London and the Barbican, the show has traveled the globe since its debut in 2014 and offers a veritable trip down nostalgia lane. This “cabinet of curiosities” explores the transformation of the arts through digital technology since the 1970s and features award-winning and critically acclaimed international artists alongside works by local artists.
There’s an overwhelming amount of eye-catching, imaginative, and straight-up fun historical tidbits on display here, appealing to both hardened gamers and the digitally uninitiated. Seven thematic exhibition spaces, including “Digital Archeology”, “Creation of All People”, “Digital Future” and “Code Art”, speak to the heuristic – if a tad overblown – ambitions of the show.
On the ground level, the visitor is somewhat clumsily invited to interact with the robotic arms ofPetting Zoo (2012) and a host of indie games: the award-winning, dystopian game Papers, Please (2013)– its complex and empathy-based gameplay aside – is a strangely relevant footnote to current debates on migration. Further along, artist Feng Mengbo pits his friends against each other in true hoi polloi Mortal Kombat-style, in the holographic fighting game Trueman Fight (2010). The real prize piece is the main room filled with steel racks displaying pre-digital computer hardware and synthesizers in glass casings, accompanied by the blips and bleeps of Aphex Twin in the background.
Vintage game fanatics will rhapsodize over the exhaustive range of retro-consoles on display, whereas '90s kids might enthuse over the selection of early World Wide Web fossils and net artworks, some of which feel goofily outdated, others of which have lost none of their inventiveness. Check out requiemforadream.com,a Flash4-heavy website made by design collective High Res that digs deep into the universe of the eponymous film by Darren Aronofsky.
Another highlight, The Deleted City, allows the user to browse and conjure up the digital vestiges of GeoCities, what was the third most popular website in the world in 1999. A team led by Richard Vijgen scoured the servers of data before deletion by owner Yahoo in 2009, amassing a 640-gigabyte file, a ghost town left over after its users abandoned the site in favor of MySpace and then Facebook. A "digital Pompeii" where you can navigate through cyber-boulevards and zoom on digital lives lost. It’s a delight to mess around with these early precursors of phenomena like vaporwave aesthetics, causing furor with the kids these days. PlayStation fanatics will be thrilled to see appearances by Parappa the Rapper and Lara Croft diving through flooded tombs, while Microsoft devotees can geek out with adocumentary about award-winning adventure-game designer Tim Schafer (ofFull ThrottleandGrim Fandango fame).
Of note in the below-ground leg of the exhibition is “Sound and Vision”, which homes in on the confluence of digital ingenuity and music and film.Award-winning artist Chris Milk's The Treachery of Sanctuary makes haunting use of Microsoft's Kinect, which much like its competitor Sony's EyeToy, has thus far had trouble exceeding gimmicky status despite the interactive technology's unmistakable visual appeal. In Neo’s Eye (2017), a specially commissioned piece by Chinese artist Wu Juehui, chunky AR-helmets imprint random numbers, code and information over people and objects (in this case, trash cans).
Evidently, some works also double as self-congratulatory showcases for digital technology companies, such as Framestore’s light-box used to model the computer-generated universe of Alfonso Cuarón’sGravity (2013). The final section of the show, entitled DevArt, is produced by Google's in-house advertising agency Creative Labs, which aims to put forward “a new type of art ... made with code.” This, along with some poorly functioning installations (like the SMS-responsive Mobile Phone Birds by “artist and geek collective” isthisgood? or Karsten Schmidt's De(Code) Factory) make us question how art, on the cusp of digital innovation, can and needs to be. But that’s not really the point.
The show is dense and playful, and even after a good two and a half hours spent inside it felt like the steep admission ticket (RMB 100) was underused. Not quite the brutalist piece of architecture that London’s Barbican Estate is sometimes derided as, but still a sight for sore eyes, WF Central is a far cry from being a beacon for the arts, despite aiming “to curate the very best cultural experiences.” That said, the show offers a welcome escape from the consumerist deluge that is Wangfujing, and easily stands comparison to the public art on display in Beijing’s other self-professed “art malls” like Parkview Green.
WF Central
Daily 10am-10pm. 269 Wangfujing Street, Dongcheng District
东城区王府井大街269号
Photos: Sid Gulinck, courtesy of WF Central