The exhibition I upload therefore I exist, curated by Margarida Saraiva, explores questions about the relationships and impact in-between human existence, technology, information, media, manipulation, personal data, artificial existence and robotics. Researching, thinking, using intuitive cognition and improvisation, as a way to picture a sensitive and subjective understanding about the future of society and the world has occupied Wong Weng Io for more than a year. The artist went through science fiction, philosophy, film, video and raw footage. The result of this process is now presented in the form of an exhibition that explores the paradoxes between the physical and the virtual realities, the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible, through artworks that are understood not as any form of conclusion or knowledge, but as starting points, as doors capable of opening up new universes for debate.
The exhibition presents large scale artwork installations titled “The Omnipresence of Text”, “The Omnipresence of Images”, “The Omnipresence of Complex” and “Past”.
“The Omnipresence of text” is inspired by the Ether, a science fiction novel set in the United States, written by Zhang Ran, a Chinese author born in 1981. In the future society described by the author, free-thinking citizens find no other space rather than silent sign language to express their views, due to omnipresence of surveillance. Wong Weng Io uses quotes from the novel, printed in hundreds of small papers, being the text partially blocked by a black marker. The artist assumes the role of the “manipulator”, producing a time-contraction and displacement of the story setting, which expands the question of information, counter-information, manipulation and falsification into another dimension, one that is atemporal, transhistorical, and transnational.
As the spectator walks inside the gallery, the artist explores “The Omnipresence of Images”. In the second room of the gallery, walls are covered with 1200 postcards made of images belonging to 3 different categories: “The World”, “Humans” and “Rubbish”. All the images were transformed in postcards, displayed in a constant rhythm along very long shelves, geometrically, rigorously and systematically organized. The images, collected by the artist, who – fighting the overabundance of information and images – try to make the (im)possible sense of the contemporary and the way in which it operates both in the physical and virtual world. This gesture, of collecting, isolating part of images, reducing and miniaturizing representations of the world, people and rubbish, becomes in the work of Wong Weng Io a repetitive gesture, as an effort to achieve clarification that again produces further ambivalence. By relating the unrelated realities, downloaded or captured, the artist places the work, as a whole, and the images, in particular, in a space-time that is simultaneously virtual, real, and mental. All the postcards are for sell and visitors are welcome to purchase them trough a system of online payment or a money collection box.
The third room presents “The Omnipresence of Complex”, composed of one hundred screens, in the dark, where selected quotes from robots questioning humans “How do you know you are human?” or “Are you real? Am I real?” or even responding to the questions about the future: The future will be “new social structure”, “new economic models”, “new business models” and “new citizenship”, further add complexities to the topics in debate, introducing artificial intelligence and robotics, as a reality that further blurs existential concerns.
The last room addresses the question of time, memory, personal data and change. In an artwork titled “Past” recorded the 2000 days of life counted from the birth date of the artist. The past becomes a pile of worthless different “containers” of information analogical sound tapes, some of them impossible to access due to technological progress. Some others eventually collected by any corporation able to continually access them, long beyond the individual to whom they originally belonged. There are two LED lightboxes situate besides “Past”, infinitely looping “I Upload Therefore I Exist”in Chinese and English, which echoes with the title of the exhibition.