In a dark exhibition space, a garden grows. The only light source is LED screens broadcasting a continuous news feed of catastrophes, weather reports, and political scandals flickering 24/7. Can plants thrive under this apocalyptic, artificial sky?
The installation titled TTTV Garden by Hong Kong artist Keith Lam is as much a celebration as it is a critique of Nam June Paik's iconic work TV Garden from 1974. “Paik is one of my favourite artists; I like all of his works. But at the same time, I wanted to question his philosophical thinking,” says Lam, who, together with curator Escher Tsai, forms the media art collective Dimension Plus based in both Hong Kong and Taipei.
In TV Garden, Paik suggests that technology and nature are not separate, but coexist as a new kind of ecosystem. The installation, which features 40 TV monitors in between hundreds of tropical plants, was one of the first works ever at the intersection of environmental art and digital culture. In an interview Paik stated: “And of course … many people had thought that television is against ecology, but in this case television is part of ecology.”
Paik also commented on how mass media influenced global communication and cultural experience. By embedding TVs among natural plants, he created a physical and conceptual “jungle” of information, referencing the overwhelming nature of television content in the modern world.
“I questioned whether technology and the natural world coexist. What if we take it one step further and technology actually replaces nature? For the installation, I researched modern LED and LCD TVs and found out that today, most screens use LED technology and some of them even emit light frequencies that are similar to those of sunlight.”
Lam found LEDs that mimic the spectrum of lights commonly used in indoor vertical farming comparable to horticultural setups.
He wondered, if LED light can be similar to sunlight, and we spend so much of our lives facing screens, then in a sense, we are constantly taking in artificial sunlight. So what if we replaced the real sky with an LED wall, an artificial sky?
From there, Lam turned to the content itself. What should appear on this new “sky”? Since the real sky is always present, 24/7, he thought about the continuous media news cycle that never stands still.
The media artist managed to program the installation showing real-time live feeds from local TV news channels. Then, using code, he transformed these broadcasts into abstract, moving visuals that mimic the clouds of the sky and provide light for the plants. “In four months and with minimal watering, the plants kept growing.”
Lam also sees TTTV Garden as a metaphor for our relationship with the media; “In some way we are just like these plants being fed pre-made media 24/7 and we keep on with our lives, but without consciously engaging in what we consume.“
Remediation to Expand Our Senses
Artworks like these, that deconstruct a medium to then repurpose it into a new use case, are characteristic of Dimension Plus’ practice. “I like to experiment with new ways to recreate or remediate a medium”, says Lam. “For example, what if we could watch sound? For me, art is about expanding our senses and perception and I can’t think of any better way to achieve that than using technology," he adds.
Dimension Plus challenges the viewer to rethink how they perceive, drawing inspiration from a theory by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who resisted the common opinion that our senses are processed in a hierarchical manner with our brain as the command center. Instead, he suggested that our entire body is processing the sensory input in a decentralized way. Lam takes this idea and uses technology to allow us to perceive in new ways, for example by watching sound.
Before starting the studio together with Escher Tsai, he lectured at City University School of Creative Media. This educational background also translates into Dimension Plus’ practice. Lam and Tsai compare their creative process to conducting research in a university: starting with a concept, investigating it, experimenting in a lab, and then presenting the findings.
For example, last year they started the AI literacy experiment "Project Patching Ti hoeh koe - AI and Geocultural Bias”. The duo used the example of a Taiwanese delicacy, the Pig Blood Cake, to show how AI misinterprets culture. “In Taiwan, it’s a popular dish, but the AI model didn’t know how to generate a proper image, instead it came up with some silly looking output, for example showing a pig covered in strawberry jam,” explains Escher Tsai. “The majority of AI systems are trained on Western datasets and don’t reflect cultures from Asia. And it doesn’t stop with food. For example, when you input “Taiwanese politician”, it might only generate images of white males wearing suits.”
Human Imagination: The Most Valuable Asset
A similar project by Dimension Plus is VS AI Street Fighting, in which the artist duo developed an interactive installation in the form of a video game competition integrating with Midjourney.
The game consisted of three rounds. In the first one, contestants had to send in an image to a certain topic together with the prompt they generated. If they impressed the jury, they were invited to the second round, an online competition in which participants competed against each other in real time and had to generate images on a wide range of topics in a matter of seconds.The finals took place live on site in Taiwan. “The contestants competed at custom-made arcade machines, and were logged into Discord accounts generating images through Midjourney. Each round brought a new topic and a strict time limit," explains Tsai. “Judges scored every image on four measures: creativity and originality counted for 30%, prompt skill another 30%, aesthetic feeling also 30%, and interpretation of the theme rounded things out at 10%. In the end, this playful project proved that the most valuable asset is always human imagination.”
Ocean Waves Transforming into Soundscapes
Dimension Plus’ experimental approach to remediation takes many forms. In June this year it was a lighthouse installation at Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour that captured the movement of waves in video data and then transformed it into melodies improvised by Hong Kong jazz pianist Daniel Chu. Visitors could listen to the sounds through specially designed telephone booths onsite.
For the project, Lam collaborated closely with media art curator Joel Kwong. “The Lighthouse was a commissioned project by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council,” she said. “They launched a new series called ARTS•TECH Exhibition. For the project, we spent almost a year with the presenter visiting different locations and discussing different kinds of ideations until we found a location along the Victoria Harbor side.”
Kwong, who is also the programme director of the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival (Microwave) is deeply embedded in Hong Kong’s contemporary art and technology landscape. She mentioned that especially within the last 5 years, the Hong Kong government has invested substantially in art-tech projects. Different stakeholders including developers, and commercial entities offer many opportunities. “As long as you are interested in exploring cross-disciplinary collaborations related to technology and architecture, art, or design, then you find interesting routes to explore,” Kwong added. Public art is gaining more and more importance in Hong Kong especially around major cultural events like Art Basel Hong Kong, which, in collaboration with cultural institutions like contemporary museum M+ commissions public works beyond traditional gallery spaces.
What makes Hong Kong’s art and technology scene unique is the pace at which artists are adopting new technologies, said Kwong. As a free trade zone without taxes, new tools are more accessible than in other places. “In Hong Kong, everything happens very fast. A lot of artists are not investing much time to dig deep into one single technology or medium. They’d rather explore and experiment.”
