F L A R E
INTERNATIONAL 2021
NEW MEDIA ART Festival
FLARE
Immersive · Interactive Audio-visual Performance
FLARE New Media Art Festival aims to utilize international academic resources, invite independent artists and creative groups from around the world to collaborate, provide international artistic content for the event venue, produce and interpret new media art and commercial value, initiate new media-related topics, and discuss the possibilities of the industry with participants to guide the future development of new media. And operates the TEA New Media Education Community, providing TouchDesigner teaching and training resources.
FLARE 2021 RECAP
Performing Artists
Radioactive Energy / Wang Meng + Yu Miao
"Wang Meng + Yu Miao" is a music group founded by new media artist Wang Meng and musician Yu Miao. They think and discuss the relationship between human nature and numbers through the unique performance of acoustic instruments and dialogue with electronic music.
Wang Meng is a new media art worker and the founder of Radioactive Vision Studio. He has served as stage multimedia designer for many well-known musicians. His artistic creations cover new media art, music, visual short films, experimental images, contemporary drama and other fields.
Yu Miao was born into a musical family and has been learning guzheng since childhood. His unique modern playing style and mix of Eastern and Western instruments give a new interpretation of guzheng music. The French media once praised her as "an innovator and presenter of the outstanding combination of Chinese classical music art, Chinese contemporary innovation, and Western improvisational music art."
EAU + Jimmz
EAU is a music visual project established in Lyon, France in 2014. It is currently completed by musician Wang Yi and many visual artists. The work attempts to express a calm emotional expression and three-dimensional multi-line thinking, while being both appreciative and artistic. Their good qualities and unique insights are fully reflected in their works. EAU means water in French, just like their works, which symbolize the change of thinking and the flow of time.
Jimmz [Zhang Jun] is the co-founder and visual design director of Digital FUN Studio. In the past few years, Jimmz has designed a large number of visual interactive contents for various large-scale commercial conferences and brand events, and has also participated in many live performances of experimental audio-visual interactions. With his powerful visual expression, combined with his ability to perceive new media elements such as sound, environment, and machinery, his works create stunning immersive synaesthetic experiences.
Frankfurt helmet + Expansion Screws
Frankfurt Helmet is an electronic duo from Wuhan who are good at using various hardware and modular synthesizers to create music with serious thoughts. His audiovisual works allow the audience to be enveloped in a cold, mechanical and straightforward rhythm. In this rhythmic force field, the audience fully accepts the artist's self-expression.
Huang Wei a.k.a. Expansion Screw, a cross-media artist, labor and technology-intensive image creator, uses high-frequency, oversaturated hybrid arrangements to observe the ups and downs of individual existence in the giant power structure of human society, recreating and joining the current doomsday carnival that is a mixture of climax and decadence, bliss and pain, pleasure and itching, exquisiteness and vulgarity, elegance and violence.
Guest Collaborators
Frankfurt Helmet
Spring Orchid
Gu Zhongyi
Anthem
Zhou Shengyu
K - ONE & Rainbow
Wang Meng + Yu Miao
Da Bei Yu Zhou
JESS Stuart
Zhang Lin
Huang Yuhui
EAU
Jimmz
Digital Fun
Zhang Lin
Huang Yuhui
"AI Medusa" Opening Show
The 4th TouchDesigner Asia Forum
Since August 2019, the TouchDesigner China community has officially become the official certified community of TouchDesigner. The China TEA Education Community will undertake all future promotion and training business of TouchDesigner in China. Since then, more community development plans and global university teaching cooperation projects have been announced at the conference.
[Online Forum Entrance - Click on the guest avatar to enter the forum link]
Greg Hermanovic
Former partner of Houdini development company Side FX
Founder of Derivative
Greg Hermanovic has been working with 3D graphics since 1974. He drew his first pixels on a CRT monitor in the mid-Atlantic in 1974 during a United Nations global weather research project. He later became Director of Research and Development at Omnibus Computer Graphics from 1984 to 1987. Greg then co-founded Side Effects Software with colleagues, which is also the manufacturing company of the digital graphics software Houdini, where he received two Science and Engineering Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences and Arts in recognition of his advancement of procedural visual effects tools in the film industry.
Greg currently leads Derivative, the company that created TouchDesigner, an application development tool for creating interactive experiences, architectural projections, puppet characters, music visuals, video servers, visualization and installation art. TouchDesigner has been used on projects for Walt Disney Imagineering, Google, Herzog & de Meuron, Prada, MIT Media Lab, Guggenheim, Plastikman, Carsten Nicolai, Michael Snow, Rush, and more.
Yuki Narumi
Japanese TD Community-TDSW Person in Charge
Tokyo Developers Study Weekend / TDSW is a project/community that organizes online events and workshops. They mainly use TouchDesigner to focus on visual programming, real-time rendering and 3D computer graphics. Their main activities are twice-monthly online workshops and free YouTube tutorials.
In order to promote the internationalization of Japanese community content, TDSW will produce English subtitles for all free tutorials. And jointly promotes Audio-Live Show lectures with Mutek, a Canadian new media art event organization.
Cao Yuxi
Cross-media Artist
Graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2013; graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a Master of Arts in Computer Art in 2016. He currently lives in New York, USA.
His works span new media performances of sound visualization, pseudo-logical tampering with elementary computer or physical programming, data visualization as ready-made contemporary art, public art in the form of lights or projections, and any cross-border form produced or circulated in digital media. His summary of his own behavior and works is: the self-salvation of an idealist forced by the overall social ideology, while retaining a sense of criticism and self-criticism, while insisting on radical and enterprising logical innovation and in-depth work.
His works are often exhibited in various contemporary art museums and new media art festivals in the form of new media installations or new media performances, such as Beijing Today Art Museum, Minsheng Art Museum, Shenzhen He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen OCAT, Chengdu OCAT, New York MOMAPS1, Shenzhen Twin Cities Architecture and City Biennale, Vancouver ISEA World Digital Art Symposium, Montreal Mutek, Geneva Mapping Art Festival, Liege BAM Art Festival, and Gijon LEV Art Festival. His new media works are often transformed into public art projects. His work "Interactive Ink Painting" is currently in the permanent collection of Beijing Daxing International Airport and also in the permanent collection of Shenzhen Citizen Square City Lighting Xiuguang Art Museum project.
Forum Recap
Touchdesigner Workshop
One of the important missions of Light Point 2021 International New Media Art Festival is to provide cross-media art enthusiasts with skills education to break through technical bottlenecks, and to popularize the aesthetic understanding of interactive new media art to the public. Therefore, the 2021 TouchDesigner new mediaart and technology workshop is a key skills promotion activity. The speaker, Jiang Shan, gave each participant a virtual model of AI Medusa.obj and led them to use TouchDesigner to create an interactive digital skin through an online live broadcast. Through 2 hours of learning, participants can control this virtual world art work in real time on their own computers.
FLARE 2021 New Media Artwork
A Snake Made of Human Skin
Medium
Ambient sound, screen (dimensions variable), microphone, computer
Visual Artist
Hill Jiang Shan
Sound Artist
Frankfurt Helmet
Exploring the question of identity authenticity in the metaverse. Based on the performance theme "Medusa's Petrifying Gaze," a petrified model of the artist's own head is uploaded into the virtual world. By extracting a single inch of skin from the model and stretching it, a serpent-skin pattern emerges. Sounds from the outside world are transmitted into the virtual space, and as if summoned by the real world, the figure struggles, fractures, twists, and deforms — is it human, or python? In the virtual world, no answer is needed. The human spiritual core remains in the physical world, while skin becomes a visual element stripped of strong identity signification. Once freed from the manufacturing processes of modern industry, every human characteristic from head to toe within the metaverse will be replaced by digital production pipelines. Everyone can become their own cyber-gene creator, crafting hundreds or thousands of their own digital skins. In this virtual world, appearance in its traditional sense will lose its power to signify.
Life Born of Light
Medium
Laser, microphone, computer, glass bottle (dimensions variable), water
Visual Artist
Hill Jiang Shan；Cong Haotian
Sound Artist
Frankfurt Helmet
A moving laser beam passes through water and glass, refracting into a breathing creature. The appearance of external sound intensifies its movement. Unlike the previous work, which creates life purely within virtual space, this piece uses a common physical phenomenon—the refraction of light—to construct the characteristics of a "creature," simulating the illusion of breathing through the laser's rhythmic motion. Combined with the refraction of different transparent materials, this produces a kind of emergent, patterned movement.