Online Art Project Seeks to Unite Asia Through Performance
Taipei Performing Arts Center | Sponsored Content

Organised by the Taipei Performing Arts Center, the event features webcam dances, researcher browser history reveals, and artistic reimaginings of the future.

The Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC) will host an online performance art project that brings together artists and audiences across Asia from 12-16 August.

Entitled An Internet of Things: Proposal for now and the near future, the event is the fourth edition of TPAC's annual Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance (ADAM), which was founded to foster cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchange in 2017.

Taiwanese artist River Lin curated Internet of Things with Vuth Lyno (Cambodia), Han Xuemei (Singapore), Elia Nurvista (Indonesia) and Madeleine Flynn (Australia). He said the event will 'bring together artists from across various disciplines, the Asia-Pacific region and beyond to respond to ongoing crises in health, human rights, ecology and the art world.'

Among the project's activities are: a dance program that invites artists to choreograph and perform dances for their webcams from their homes; a lecture-performance series where artists, curators and researchers reveal what they've been obsessing over online through the lens of their digital playlists and browser histories; and a series of conversations between artists and art professionals about the future they desire, beginning with four themes: digital communities, artistic practice, labour, and ecology.

Artists participating in An Internet of Things include: Tada Hengsapkul (Thailand), Russ Ligtas (The Philippines), Michikazu Matsune (Japan), Venuri Perera (Sri Lanka), Natasha Tontey (Indonesia), Scarlet Yu (Hong Kong), Au Sow-Yee (Malaysia), Martinka Bobrikova and Oscar De Carmen (Norway), and Xiao Ke and Zi Han (China).

As well as bringing artists together from across Asia, TPAC hopes the ADAM project will be able to move around the region in future editions.

'Based on our vision to develop TPAC into an Asian centre for joint production endeavors, we ... hope that the ADAM project will be hosted by other Asian cities, thereby gradually overcoming that what separates us and moving forward together with cities across the continent,' said TPAC Director Austin Wang.

To visit the 2020 edition of ADAM, register online here. —[O]