# The Artist is Present

Virtual studio visit: :vampire: :squid:
***Vampire Squid*** by **Pete Jiadong Qiang**

## 2:00 pm Introduction to transmediale, theme, Vilém Flusser Residency, Pete and his work

## 2:20 - 2:50 pm Artist talk and screening by [Pete Jiadong Qiang](https://www.jiadongqiang.co.uk/)
Guests:
- [Helen Pritchard](http://www.helenpritchard.info/#1)
- [Atau Tanaka](https://www.gold.ac.uk/computing/people/tanaka-atau/)
- [Anita Jóri](https://www.udk-berlin.de/personen/detailansicht/person/show/anita-jori/)

## 2:50 - 3:00 pm Q&A

You can read more about the residency programme here: https://archive.transmediale.de/resource/residency

**FAQ:**

**How to participate:**
Please join the room following the link of [Vampire Squid](http://vampyroteuthis.infernalis.hyperbody.space/).

If you haven't used Mozilla Hubs before, you may find the basics [here](https://hubs.mozilla.com/docs/intro-hubs.html).

If you'd like to stay in touch with the artist, you may join the Discord [channel](https://discord.gg/PBtwzk9A).

**How to ask questions**
You may type in questions directly in the chat.
Pete will answer all the questions after his talk.

**Gameplay guide**
- Feel free to move around and interact with any objects by pressing spacebar.
- Don't be afraid of modifying anything in the room.
- If you feel laggy inside the space, please click More and choose Preference, go into Misc and adjust the Max Resolution.
- You can choose to Spectate instead of Enter Room if you don’t feel comfortable to interact in 3D space.

**Code of Conduct**

We are committed to providing a harassment and discrimination-free experience for everyone. To this end, all attendees are required to comply with our code of conduct. We do not tolerate harassment, discrimination, inappropriate physical contact, unwelcomed sexual attention, or violent behavior in any form. We continue to do our best to make sure we learn from any feedback, incidents, or mistakes to make sure they will not happen again. Please let us know if you have any feedback to [e-mail].

transmediale

transmediale creates a space for critical reflection on cultural transformation from a post-digital perspective. For over thirty years, the annual festival for art and digital culture has been bringing together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide.

Beyond the yearly event, transmediale is a transversal, dynamic platform with a vibrant community and a strong network that facilitates regular publications and year-round activities including commissions and artist residencies. One of transmediale’s closest cooperation partners is CTM Festival. The German Federal Cultural Foundation (kulturstiftung des Bundes) has supported transmediale as a cultural institution of excellence since 2004.

At the heart of transmediale’s activities is the annual festival that has turned into an essential event in the calendar of media art professionals, artists, and students from all over the world. The annually changing themes are being reflected through exhibitions, performances, screenings, and workshops. Among other things transmediale has discussed the role of emotions and cultural emergence in digital culture, the political, economic, and cultural divides of our time, the elusiveness of perpetually transitioning media cultures at the festival.

Since 2020, transmediale operates under the artistic direction of Nora O Murchú, at the side of long-time staff member Filippo Gianetta, who takes on the role of managing director.

The dilemma for refusal has never felt quite so urgent. Easily misunderstood as a gesture of inaction and passivity where nothing happens, a refusal instead can be an insistence on an alternative or a demand for reform. From boycotts to strikes to collective or individual withdrawals, the long and paradoxical history of refusal suggests political and social imaginaries that say more than a mere no. As an act that often carries with it both risk and promise, a refusal opens up possibilities for worlds that can and should be.

The task of refusing is not without its difficulties – it is made up of compromise and friction, and demands for acting and imagining in ways that lie outside the status quo. Manifesting in many forms, a refusal can call attention to uncommon and messy practices, crucial to the critique and reinvention of our material world. For some, refusal is a luxury that stems from an advantage; for others, it manifests from regressive, reactionary politics. Too often refusal is a stance adopted after years of exile, exclusion, or oppression. It asks for multiplicity, difference, and co-existence, rather than fixed systems of logic that organise and tie socio-political lives to undeclared algorithmic biases and colonial histories.

Over the coming year, transmediale will map out the political agency of refusal, exploring its potential to form new socio-political realities. Building an understanding of the theme through three key thematic strands: friction, scale, and entanglement, the festival explores the relations between different modes of refusal and how they intersect. From its capacity to enact new forms of solidarity, to how refusal can deepen our critical engagement with technology, the festival aims to facilitate an understanding of different tactics of refusal and how they can form an assemblage of collective political responsibilities.

Taking place online and offline, the festival’s year-long structure aims to create a longer engagement with the festival theme and open up new opportunities for artists through an expanded residency programme. As part of this year-long investigation, the festival has launched a new digital platform - the Almanac for Refusal - that brings together a collection of browser-based artworks; films, essays, podcasts, and more. These contributions, along with documentation of our in-person events, will bring together the work of artists, designers, researchers, and activists whose practices map out the way refusal can unfold and circumvent the status quo.

Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research

The Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research is part of transmediale’s resource all-year activities. It supports knowledge production as the guiding principle for the concept of artistic research, a dialogue between different standpoints (science and art, laboratory and applied research, old and new media, local and global forms of organization).

For Vilém Flusser, theory and praxis were intrinsically tied to each other. His nomadic thinking was shaped by a philosophy of positions, experimental testing of different ways of thinking, and the linking of different disciplines and methodologies. Not the search for the truth but rather the experimenting with the aesthetic constitution of truth characterized his thinking, often developed in dialog with others.

With the residency program, transmediale and the Vilém Flusser Archive are calling upon artistic research projects that actively explore the capabilities and limitations of transdisciplinary and transmedial situations in contemporary culture. Artistic research is understood as an exploration of the links between aesthetics, materiality, and politics. The 2-months residency aims at supporting projects and works in different stages of development, from the first conceptual steps up to significant advancements of already existing projects.

The call for applications for the residency program is published every year in autumn. The residency takes place in the following year between May and July.

The residency program is a cooperation between the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and transmediale, festival for art and digital culture Berlin. The Vilém Flusser Archive is located in the premises of the Institute of Time-Based Media and holds the literary remains of the cultural theorist Vilém Flusser. The archive is directed by professor Maren Hartmann and headed by the scientific supervisor Anita Jóri.

Artist Pete Jiadong Qiang will talk about his time during the residency with us at 2.20pm. He will offer a screening / play-through and conversation exploring Qiang’s recent interactive works. The event will revolve around pete’s concept of the “HyperBody,” a transformative, fluid, group-determined identity composed of community material from gaming, comics, anime, and other fandoms, crossing over between physical and virtual space. Pete explores the concept of the HyperBody in videogames and installations that incorporate practices drawn from videogame and online fan culture, including modding (making user-determined enhancements), crossover (bridging characters from various fictional words), and shipping (desiring romantic connection between fictional characters).

We are delighted to announce Pete Jiadong Qiang has been selected for the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research 2020. His project HyperBody was selected by jury members Anita Jóri, Nora O Murchú, and Martha Schwendener.

Qiang’s ongoing research embraces virtual and computational architecture to investigate new techno-Oriental contexts for queer bodies to inhabit and negotiate. These experimental landscapes offer the potential for connections across heterogeneous worlds made up of fragments of anime and gaming pictorial elements. In opening up these spaces for others to inhabit, Pete offers speculative futures that are imbued with cultural values for the encounter of technological and artistic productions that reside within an Asian framework.

For the residency, Pete continued to develop this research in Berlin, conducting ethnographic studies of public spaces and queer communities. These studies informs the development of an immersive landscape in Berlin — a collectively inhabited environment opened through a queer lens that intends to politicise and disorient our understandings of the site. It not only challenges how we perceive the constraints and limits of our material world but also imagines other practices of sociality. In HyperBody Pete’s Maximalist approach aims to redefine the space enveloping Berlin-based bodies through visual excess and the unfolding of multiple worlds of desire.

“(...) we can no longer see our bodies as things among other things in the world. We now see our bodies as mediations between ourselves and all the other things in the world. In fact: because all things are experienced by us through our body one way or another, we ought to make a map of our body before we can try to make maps of things in the world” (Vilém Flusser, Toward a map of the body).

For the jury, Qiang’s project resonates with theorists around queer utopianism and communities of hope. In HyperBody Qiang develops a strategy for revitalisation in order to create discourse around resistance and the rebuilding of worlds — a needed political gesture within our present political moment.

The residency program is a cooperation between the Vilém Flusser Archive at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and transmediale, festival for art and digital culture Berlin.

Pete Jiadong Qiang is currently a PhD student in arts and computational technology at Goldsmiths and trained in architecture at Architectural Association School of Architecture. His work focuses on the specific investigation of the bridges and interstices between pictorial, architectural and game spaces. His works range from architectural drawings, paintings, moving images to photogrammetry, augmented reality (AR) drawings, virtual reality (VR) paintings and games that form an idiosyncratic research methodology between the physical and virtual spaces with ACGN (Animation, Comic, Game and Novel) and fandom contexts. Pete Jiadong Qiang is often referred to as architectural Maximalist.

Website
Twitter: @jiadongqiang
Instagram: @pete33333333