December 1, 2006 to January 13, 2007
Press preview, Wednesday, November 29, 2006 from noon to 2pm
Reception: Thursday November 30, 2006, 6pm
Organized by National Taiwan Museum of fine Arts
The Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition called, Baby Love, developed by celebrated Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang. The exhibition runs from December 1, 2006 to January 13, 2007. A press briefing will be held on Wednesday 29, November, from noon to 2 pm.
Baby Love is a wifi mobile installation that consists of 6 large autonomously mobile teacups (67 inches in diameter) with 6 clone babies (each 28 inches tall). The teacups are modeled after spinning carnival rides, except that the soundtrack of love songs can be uploaded by public via the web at http://babylove.biz and directly to the teacups, where they are coded as ME (memory and emotion) data for the clone babies. When the museum visitor takes a teacup ride with the babies, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes. Baby Love situates human and baby clone riders in a perpetual spin which fuses the familiar fairground iconography with contemporary "remix" pop culture.
Baby Love is the second installment of Shu Lea Cheang's Locker Baby Project which also includes Baby Play (presented at NTT [ICC], Tokyo in 2001) and Baby Work (to be realized). Referring to Ryu Murakami's noted novel, Coin Locker Babies (1980), the updated locker babies are born out of Tokyo coin lockers by DPT (Dolly Polly Transgency) with genes extracted from deep-sea pearls. The "biobot" locker babies are the clone generation of our sci-fi fantasy reality, entrusted to receive, store, transmit and negotiate human memory and emotions. The teacups are modeled after the spinning teacup of the old-time playground and as such have a somewhat nostalgic presence that collides with the cloned baby. The baby adorned with a locker key, a LED display with random locker numbers, is installed with a baby machine (a Mac mini with 802.11 wifi connection). The spinning wheel on the teacup is wired with sensors. The sensor data (direction and speed) sent via RS 232 and 802.11 to the baby commands the baby machine whose sound engine (written in Max MSP), receives and processes the MP3 database. When the teacup is in motion, its direction and speed vary the shuffle and rearrange the love songs in the baby engine. The teacup's bottom plate, inflated with a silicon tube, encloses a circular strip of contact bumper so that the teacups can safely bump into each other, in a gentler version of the fairground bumper cars. When teacups collide, the baby engine is informed, sound files are exchanged and remixed and played back into the web stream.
In Baby Love, Shu Lea Cheang continues her exploration of our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet and its impact on cultural practices. It is an installation which mixes nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age with the technically boggling interactive technology of the connections on the net, Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us? Will it lead to an expanded universe of knowledge or to a frightening scenario of dehumanization, where even the emotions of a baby can be programmed at will?
Love songs can be uploaded, deposited, recycled for the clone babies of the installation at http://babylove.biz where the viewer can also find complete technical descriptions of the installation and download images.
Panel Discussion: Saturday, December 2 from 2:30 ? 3:30 pm. Shu Lea Cheang will present Babylove and answer questions from the public about the project.
Baby Love was initially produced by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts commission with support from Council for Culture Affairs, Taiwan in collaboration with SQV Design International, Tatung University, Mechanical Engineering department, eLife Techonology Innovation Center, Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris. US exhibition liaison: Taipei Cultural Center [TECO], New York.
For More Information go to:
www.chelseaartmuseum.org
www.babylove.biz