UCCA Beijing Open Today, 10:00-19:00 (Final entry: 18:30)
UCCA Dune Open Today, 9:30-19:30 (Final entry: 19:00)
UCCA Edge Closed Today,
UCCA Beijing2017.8.25
NEU x A Better Version of 人: A Double Opening
2017.8.25
19:00-23:00
UCCA hosts an evening of a double opening as NEU and the Goethe-Institut´s Project “A Better Version of 人” have their respective opening nights. In collaboration with UCCA and CTM – Berlin´s worldwide renowned festival for adventurous music and art, they together present China and Berlin-based artists on the cutting edge of music, art, and technology.
Marco Donnarumma, for the first time in China, will present Corpus Nil, a ritual of birth for a modified body, a tense and sensual choreography between a human performer and an artificially intelligent machine, exploding through sound and light. SHAO, together with Wang Meng, will follow up with one of their rare audiovisual performances, merging moody teutonic-technoid sound sculptures and matching it with Wang Meng’s brilliant brooding visual artistry while GOOOOOSE performs a special audiovisual set created especially for this night.
About NEU
NEU is China’s First International Future Festival. In a two-day extravaganza, NEU brings together bold minds from technology and science, music, the visual arts, filmmaking, and media, to explore the opportunities and challenges of our near and far future.
The inaugural NEU Festival was held 2016 in Berlin, together with the Tech Open Air (TOA) event, Europe’s leading Technology Festival. Over 1000 participated in NEU's discussions and forums and attended the legendary NEU China Night at one of Berlin’s hottest clubs, Ritter Butzke. Now NEU is back, bigger and better. And this time in Beijing, on August 25th and 26th.With a mix of lectures, discussions, workshops, exhibitions, concerts and club events, the NEU Future Festival will take place across some of the best venues in the Chinese capital city: CHAO, Migas, and UCCA.
About A Better Version of 人
Technology makes our daily lives more convenient in many different ways. But, in being a convenience, it also takes away the potentials for actions that used to be the domain of the human. Actions and decisions that have traditionally been a prerogative of humans are increasingly handed over to networked digital technologies and so-called “artificial intelligence”. A Better Version of 人 asks how these technologies determine our actions and to what extent it is turning into an acting subject in its own right. During this opening weekend Goethe-Institut will take a deeper look at “Who is playing the music” and asks how algorithms might take over the creative role of the human composer and musician. Starting with a performative opening on the 25th at UCCA, we will follow up with a discussion together with Thomas Venker, Marco Donnarumma and Han Han on the 27th at the Goethe-Institut. A Better Version of人 is a joint project by the Goethe Institut in China, South Korea and Japan. The project attempts to describe the current situation as one where the idea of the human as an autonomous actor has given way to ubiquitous technologies performing as quasi-subjects. Over the course of one year we want to invite experts, performers and artists to open up the opportunity for dialogue. One of the highlights will be a technology exhibition featuring international artists’ reflections on these self-developing technologies the question of human sovereignty.
About CTM
CTM is one of the world’s leading international festivals for contemporary electronic and experimental music. The festival was founded in 1999 and takes place in Berlin in February each year, concurrently and cooperatively with the transmediale – international festival for art and digital culture. With its notable size and reputation among professionals, during its 17 years of existence CTM has earned a place among the world’s top-ranking festivals and become an essential meeting point for the international music community. The festival receives repeated praise from the media and has been called “Germany’s most important gathering for electronic and experimental music” and “Berlin’s best pop festival."
Ticketing:
RMB 120/Adult
RMB 100 /UCCA Member
Note：
*Enjoy UCCA Member ticket prices with the purchase of a yearly membership card (RMB 300);
*Collect your ticket from reception 30 minutes before the event begins;
*Please no late entry;
*Seating is limited, and tickets must be collected individually;
*Please keep mobile devices on silent.
Scan the QR code below to sign up for UCCA membership and enjoy exclusive member benefits.
Ticketing QR Code
Scan the QR code below to purchase your ticket.
Guests
Marco Donnarumma (Performance Artist, musician, PHD Robotics & AI)
A unique presence across contemporary performance and media art, Marco Donnarumma distinguishes himself by his use of emerging technology to deliver artworks that are at once intimate and powerful, oneiric and uncompromising, sensual and confrontational. Working with biotechnology, biophysical sensing, as well as artificial intelligence and neurorobotics, Donnarumma expresses the chimerical nature of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. He is renown for his focus on sound, whose physicality and depth he exploits to create experiences of instability, awe, shock and entrainment. In over a decade of practice Donnarumma has developed a deeply transdisciplinary expertise, drawing equally from live art, music, biological science, computation and cultural studies. He holds a Ph.D. in performing arts, computing and body theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Berlin University of the Arts in partnership with the Neurorobotics Research Lab Berlin. Born in Naples, Italy, 1984, Donnarumma currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
SHAO (Composer & sound designer, FakeLoveMusic / Tresor)
Shao began making electronic music in 2002. Influenced by classical oriental philosophy and Industrial German and Bauhaus ideals, his music explores the relationship between sound and space. Tensions are interweaved with restrained emotions, and a sense of space running through the movement, can be felt - calm, solid, yet highly impressive. After putting out several albums (Mental Imagery, 2005 / Mental Magic, 2006 Psychedelic Elephant, 2008 / 'Tíng,Tái,Lóu,Gé' 2011) and playing international festivals and venues in Mexico, Macau, India, Switzerland (Electron Festival), Germany (Worldtronics Festival), Portugal (Cidade Preocupada Festival) and Norway (World Music Festival) he signed with Beijing/Berlin based label FakeLoveMusic and the music agency FakeMusicMedia. In Sept 2015 he released his EP Dopplershift Pt. 1 on Tresor Records which makes him the first Chinese artist ever on the label of this legendary Berlin techno club and played the TRESOR showcase at ADE in Amsterdam.In March 2016 he was named one of the international artists to watch by THE FADER and subsequently toured extensively in and outside of China (St. Petersburg, Arts Electronica, Helsinki, OZ Asia Adelaide, Sonar Hong Kong, and more). He´s now working on his next album scheduled for end of 2017. Shao was born in 1981 and currently resides in Beijing.
GOOOOOSE (Musician)
GOOOOOSE is the side project of Han Han, front man of one of China’s most well-known experimental-rock/electronic band “Duck Fight Goose” and also owner of the experimental record label Miniless Recordings. His multiinstrumental approach of making music usually leads the audience into a place where electronic, ambient and strange time-signatured rock music find their harmony, yet still fighting with each other sometimes. GOOOOOSE is more like a spiritual cave of Han Han, who currently lives in Shanghai. There are 5 Os.
Wang Meng (Visual Artist)
Wang Meng is a Chinese avant-garde visual artist and co-founder of Atomic Visual Studio. His work spans video, animation, multimedia stage visual design, painting, and more. His work has been exhibited at many art festivals, including Jelly Generation exhibition in the US and MADATAC New Media Art Festival in Spain. His audio-visual interactive performance The Shape of Sound has been invited to many internationally renowned music and art festivals, such as Worldtronics Fesitival (DE), Electron Festival (CH), Cidade Preocupada Festival (PT), etc. Wang Meng also collaborated with many well-known Chinese musicians for live concert stage visual design, including Luo Qi, Li Zhi, SHAO, Peng Tan, Li Quan, Cao Fang, XTX, etc. Wang Meng has been working with leading Chinese theater director Meng Jinghui, and designed unique multimedia stage for Meng`s most experimental and best-selling play, Soft (2010). Wang Meng's animation film BeBeBeBe was exhibited in the UK Pavillion during the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
Collaborators
NEU
Goethe-Institut
CTM
Fake Music Media
Schedule
18:00-18:20 Ticket pick-up at the reception desk (for UCCA members who RSVPed)
18:20-18:50 Exclusive UCCA members-only guided tour
18:30-19:00 Ticket distribution at the reception desk (for UCCA members who didn’t RSVP and non-members)
19:00–23:00 Performance
UCCA Beijing
Open Today, 10:00-19:00 (Final entry: 18:30)
798, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Beijing
Tel: +86 10 5780 0200
Fax: +86 10 5780 0200
UCCA Dune
Open Today, 9:30-19:30 (Final entry: 19:00)
Aranya Gold Coast, Beidaihe
Tel: +86 335 7522 652
UCCA Edge
Closed Today, 10:00-19:00
2F, No. 88 Xizang Bei Lu, Jing'an District, Shanghai
Tel: +86 21 6628 6861
