The GHost Formula at NTMoFA (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art)
The GHost Formula, is part of the exhibition, No Such Thing As Gravity, at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Taiwan from April 22 – June 25 2017.
Co-curated by Professor Mike Stubbs, director and CEO of FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool) and Dr Rob La Frenais, an international independent curator, art is used in this exhibition to explore the grey areas at the limits of science and other controversial issues, with emphasis placed on trans-disciplinary collaborations with contemporary art and science.
The GHost Machine, Sarah Sparkes, 2016
Based on a neuroscience experiment, it attempts to induce FoP (Feeling of Presence). Robot fabrication by Sarah Angliss.
Read a review of the GHost Machine in the New Scientist here
No Such Thing As Gravity
Curators
Rob LA FRENAIS
Mike STUBBS
Artists
Tania CANDIANI, Yin-Ju CHEN, Gina CZARNECKI and John HUNT, Evelina DOMNITCH and Dmitry GELFAND, Nick LAESSING, Nahum MANTRA, Agnes MEYER-BRANDIS, Lab of Distant Relatives (Theresa Tsun-Hui TSAO, Chang-Huei GE, Mu-Ching WU), Helen PYNOR, Semiconductor, Sarah SPARKES
GHost Residency
Sparkes will be undertaking a residency funded by the NTMoFA, in the weeks running up to the exhibition. During this time she will be researching ghost culture in Taiwan and presenting this information on her website the GHost Portal. Artifacts, used in Taiwan ghost rituals, will be added to her installation in the museum.
GHost -Hostings 18 – The GHost Exchange
In addition Sparkes will convene one of her GHost Hostings, bringing together artists and researchers from Taiwan to discuss the idea of ‘Ghost Exchange’
Read more about GHost Hostings 18 here
About the Exhibition
British Council is pleased to support ‘No Such Thing As Gravity’ – an exhibition showcasing arts and creative technology presented by UK’s leading media art centre – Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA), the leading museum for digital arts and creativity in Taichung. Curated by Professor Mike Stubbs, artistic director of FACT and Dr. Rob La Frenais, guest curator from the UK, the exhibition attempts to explore the unknown areas and controversial issues in science through the lenses of artists and creative technologists. Hosted at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts from April 22 to June 25, the exhibition will show to audience the trend of cross-disciplinary collaboration between contemporary art and science, responding to the questions of humanistic and philosophical perspectives in science.
Digital innovation in Arts is recognized by both UK and Taiwan as an important area of artistic development. Through video art, new media art, and installation of creative technology, artists, scientists and creative technologists work together, exploring new ways of artistic expression and scientific discovery. Reconnecting arts and science through digital innovation also help communicating new knowledge with wider audiences of various ages and knowledge background in a more creative approach.
By supporting this project ‘No Such Thing as Gravity’, British Council in Taiwan hope to encourage more creative partnerships beyond capital cities between UK and Taiwan, stimulating curiosity and intellectual debates, breaking the past boundaries between arts and science, and facilitating better understanding of two cultures though innovation
About the Artists
In ‘No Such Thing As Gravity’ the artists are from the UK, Germany, Mexico, Taiwan, Australia, and Russia, presenting 14 pieces of art works, including new media, video art, installation, photography and performance. 5 teams of artists are from and working in the UK.
Sarah Sparkes, walking the thin line between belief and observed data, collaborating with psychologists and paranormal investigators, created an installation Ghost Formula to provide a neutral platform from which the visitor can investigate and interrogate the idea of the ghost. During her residency “The GHost Exchange” at NTMoFA, working with Taiwan based ghost researchers, psycologists, local historians and artists, Sarah will collect local Taiwan ghost stories for The GHost Portal web archive, to examine and document the cultural significance of human interaction with a spirit world.
Artist Nick Laessing has spent the last ten years travelling the world tracking down the mythologies of free energy, particularly the notion that one could run a car on water. In January 2013, together with Jimmy Whitmore, an engineer from the UK, he adapted a Volkswagen Golf car to run on water and to drive it from his studio in Amsterdam to Geneva. This car has since been successfully run on water. He is approaching this work as an artist, neither accepting nor rejecting the idea that his experiments might work.
Heirloom by artist Gina Czarnecki and scientist John Hunt tested the limits of medical science and the possibility of using cell growth to recapture eternal youth. Looking at the potential impact of innovation on personal identity, they have created a living process of growth tissue, where delicate skin cells frame portraits of Czarnecki’s daughters. The exhibits reveal the process behind the artwork, a process that could develop into future medical procedures or even DIY techniques for capturing life.
The End is a Distant Memory by Helen Pynor (Australia/UK) explored the ambiguous borders between life and death at cellular and experiential levels. Working as artist with geneticists & biologists, Pynor has studied ‘marginal’ cells that remain alive inside dead tissue, considering the implications of a breakdown between living ‘subject’ and dead ‘object’. In a video we see a dead chicken drop to the ground in slow motion and a near-death survivor being manipulated by actors in a re-creation of the operating theatre.
Finally, Semiconductor, UK artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, make visually and intellectually engaging moving image works, which explore the material nature of our world and how we experience it through the lens of science and technology. They present two films in this exhibition – Worlds in the Making and Magnetic Movie. Worlds in the Making is a moving image work that uses the tools of volcanology to re-interpret the landscapes of our volcanic planet, by translating data collected from volcanoes into audio, evoking images of rocks grinding below the earth, and creating animations of matter forming as mineral crystals. Magnetic Movie shows the experiment on invisible magnetic fields conducted and described by NASA’s Space scientists. Actual VLF (Very low frequency) audio recordings control the evolution of the magnetic fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons.
Next to the exhibition, the public programme will include a performance, a participatory forum, a bio-medical workshop, guided tours by academic experts and a public conference presenting the dialogues among the curators, the artists, and the Taiwanese scientists in the medical, physics and psychology fields.
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