i -City：數位空間中的虛擬城市

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　

　　　　 　　　　　　　　　　　　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　策展人Curator / 謝慧青

時間與空間的後現代混亂中，時間的連續性崩解成為延伸，空間向度失落成為複本，都市文化轉變為巨型全息圖，可以在顯而易見的空無中生產各種影像。時間和空間在這個過程中，—轉化為自身的圖像，並進而化為情景。
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　~Celeste Olalquiaga in Megalopolis

 

 「i」是數學中的虛數，雖然不是存在於自然界中的自然數，而卻可以在算式中演算開展。本次展覽以「i-City」比喻在現實中不存在，而卻存在於數位空間中的虛擬城市。藝術家所架構而成的數位城市，在地球表面的物理空間不存在，地圖上也找不到，而卻存在於數位空間之中，可任人遨遊。

  三月中旬於台北數位藝術中心開展的「存在．不存在的城市i-City」展覽，參展藝術家包括: 曹斐、陳依純、黃心健、賴俊羽、李文政、葉姿秀，共六位來自台灣與大陸的當代藝術家，作品以新媒體藝術為主，呈現方式豐富多元，包括：即時互動裝置、環狀投影裝置、錄像藝術、數位輸出、電視牆、網路藝術等等。

 

第三空間
數位空間的概念也顛覆了我們過去對空間的觀念，超越了我們所經驗的實體空間地理的概念，可能隨著手指點一下滑鼠或鍵盤，隨即變化轉換到不同的網路空間，它是自由移動、瞬息萬變的。許多學者也以類德勒茲（Gilles Deleuze）的「根莖」概念來比喻網路的水平游移、網狀連接的結構。這樣的數位空間不是我們真實世界所接觸的生活空間—「第一空間」，也不是也不是概念所生成的構想的空間—「第一空間」；而是擁有索雅（Edward W. Soja）所描繪的「第三空間」的特色：具有「真實與想像兼具」的性質，是一種「其他（an-Other）的理解與行動方式，著眼於改變人類生活的空間性，一種獨特的批判性空間察覺。」

   藝術家挪用真實城市中所見的建築元素或街頭風景，解構之後在數位世界中
「再現空間」，創造出兼具真實與想像特質的城市空間，同時也以各種變形、轉化、象徵、移置的手法來對對真實世界進行反諷與顛覆。藝術家們創造出另一個混雜而又異質化的虛擬城市，與真實城市平行、相似卻又截然不同，再現了異質化的第三空間；作品中的虛擬城市，一方面反映了真實世界中的城市文化，是如何在全球化的浪潮下被衝擊碰撞，產生出各種混雜並存的異質文化的狀態。另一方面，也反映出在現今社會中，網際網路已經滲透到每個人的日常生活，我們所存在的空間已經不僅僅是物理世界中所見所聞，而已經透過網路延伸到無限無盡的網路，而數位城市是可以由我們自由建構、自由想像。

混雜與異質的重組
曹斐的《我‧鏡》以及《人民城寨的生活》，是以她在第二人生網路平台中的化身中國‧翠西為主角所拍攝的短片。在《人民城寨的生活》中，透過翠西與他的孩子中國‧山之間的問答，逐漸揭露了人民城寨建設的過程與虛擬城市的特性，以及真實世界與之對應的關係。中國各大城市過去幾年來大興土木，如本有許多老胡同以及古蹟建築的北京城，突然之間與西方建築師所打造出的現代建築交相雜處，使得北京的城市風貌充滿了混雜與異質性。曹斐將這樣的有如第三空間的北京城解構重組，並混雜入上海、香港以及西方的建築，重組再現為人民城寨（RMB City）， 其中充滿了藝術家個人遊戲式的嘲諷式：大熊貓、中央電視台被懸吊在空中，古根漢美術館變成甜甜圈等等。

　《我‧鏡》共有三部分，是曹斐在第二人生中的旅程紀錄。第一部份描繪了曹斐心中的這個由金錢所打造的世界，雖然是虛擬的，但卻是一個相當資本主義的世界，現實中帶著冷酷。第二部分則反應了曹斐在第二人生的世界中所遇到的真情。雖然化身是虛擬的，然而與網路中遇到的朋友，交往共渡的時間與情感卻是再真實不過的感受；第三部分則反映出在此世界中跨越種族、國界的世界觀。雖然這是一個由金錢、消費所建構的虛擬世界，卻仍然吸引了許許多多各型各色的人們來到這個世界中。

  在《上海，我能請你跳支舞嗎？》中，黃心健擷取了上海城市中各時代的建築元素，透過與觀眾的互動，隨機選取的城市建築外觀組合形成與觀眾相同輪廓的人型，隨著音樂舊上海時代的舞曲而翩翩起舞。古典的鐘樓、山型牆、紅磚，與現代的水泥公寓、陽台鐵窗等等各種上海城市可見的建築外觀，隨著觀眾的來來去去，交織、重組，又崩裂消失；建築凝聚了人類歷史的記憶，在時間的洪流中傾頹消失，在數位世界中重新化身為人，串連著小市民的城市記憶與夢想，組成一曲城市建築的數位之舞。

城市的數位寓言
李文政與賴俊羽作品中的數位城市，是對應於真實城市的象徵式寓言，敘述了他們對自身所在城市的觀察與省思。在M型資本分布、貧富差距日益拉大的現代社會，以及文化全球化的浪潮中，日、韓、美、中等各地文化滲透到台灣，文化的混雜並存，也影響了城市的發展與面貌。賴俊羽的《歿日》中，太陽由林立的高樓華廈中升起，色彩鮮艷的招牌上卻是標示著「天災人禍」、「惡鬥與衝突」、「假基督出現」等等警世的標語；卻沒料到太陽的升起，帶來的卻是爆炸與末日，世界崩毀又重生，最後重新回歸於鐵皮與木板搭建的貧民聚落。在兩種城市型態的落差之中，也看到藝術家對現今M型社會結構的憂心。

   而李文政的《看見不見的海》，則讓象徵著台灣的島嶼，在一片空無的海平面中升起，台灣日常生活中常見的建築元素組合成這個充滿生機的島嶼都市，不料卻被巨龍吞噬，爾後又幻化重生為巨大的機器人，光芒萬丈平地升起，變形為巨大的宇宙都市。而《卉花博覽會》中，城市建築變異化身的巨大怪獸，現身於台北花博展館附近的城市空間，是藝術家對台北花博所產生的社會怪現象，提出反省與嘲諷。台灣常見的城市景觀，如：高樓、公寓、窗戶、霓虹燈、廣告、紅綠燈、橋梁、摩天輪等等混雜的建築元素，在李文政的作品中彷彿是機械的模型組件，如同變形金般組合變身為各種巨大怪獸，由地景中湧現，再度降臨於原本的地貌；騷動著的是根植於本土市民們的生命能量，各種混雜並陳的城市景觀也正是台灣城市風貌的寫照。

資訊的空間轉化
馬歇爾‧麥克魯漢（Marshall McLuhan）主張，任何技術都逐漸創造出一種全新的人的環境，此新環境並非消極的包裝用品，而是積極的作用進程，而這些新環境把之前的舊環境轉變為一種人為的藝術形式。葉姿秀的《微訊》，是將城市中所產生、使用傳播的電子訊號與數位訊息，轉化為不同色彩的光源；在漆黑的房間中，藝術家布置了無數個微小的各色LED小燈，不斷地明暗閃爍，在黑暗建構成一個虛幻的城市；在不知不覺中，各種資訊產品已經不知不覺地滲入到我們的生活四周，在物理的空間中構成了另一種資訊的網絡空間。

   陳依純《一封可憐的信件標題，當你開啟卻中毒了!》中，藝術家以無窮無盡的後街小巷來比喻網路中的空間連接。當你漫遊在網路中時，隨時可能會遇到病毒木馬，就像是在實際的城市空間中，徘徊在迷宮般的防火小巷中，擔心會遇到埋伏的歹徒；展在眾多的後巷入口，你該選擇哪一條路呢?影像前不時飛過一架飛機、掠過一個模型女孩，或是招牌或燈籠，甚至是公雞、黑狗或犀牛。在網路時代中，你可能透過偶然的連結，進入不同的網頁空間，有時會有驚奇的發現，有時是無趣的垃圾，而有時也會遇到危險！網路空間成了網民們每天必定探入的世界，也是我們越來越熟悉的世界；首頁就是大門口，而這門口通往世界各地。陳依純以現實中的空間元素，再現了她對網路空間的真實感受。

  六位藝術家們以現實中的城市元素再現了他們對城市的印象以及感受，構築了充滿想像力以及令人驚奇的虛擬城市。誰說虛擬城市是不存在的呢？它，存在於你我的真實感受之中。

 

 

i-City: Virtual Cities in Digital Space

Real/Virtual: i-City Curatorial Philosophy
Hui-Ching Hsieh, curator of Real/Virtual: i-City

 

The postmodern confusion of time and space, in which temporal continuity collapses into extension and spatial dimension is lost to duplication, transforms urban culture into a gigantic hologram capable of producing any image within an apparent void. In this process, time and space are transformed into icons of themselves and consequently rendered into scenarios.
Celeste Olalquiaga in Megalopolis1992, 19 (qtd. in Soja 237)

 

Although not a natural number which exists in the natural world, “i”, an imaginary number in mathematics, can be calculated in equation. This exhibition uses the term of “i-City” to refer to a virtual city that doesn’t exist in reality but does in the digital space. Those digital cities configured by artists are neither existent within material space on earth nor can be found on the map; however, they exist in the digital domain that can be traveled by human beings.

Real/Virtual: i-City, which is inaugurated in Taipei Digital Art Center in mid-March, includes six artists from both Taiwan and Mainland China: Fei Cao, I-Chun Chen, Hsin-Chien Huang, Chun-Yu Lai, and Wen-Cheng Lee, Tzu-Hsiu Yeh. This exhibition features on diversified forms of new media arts, including interactive installation, circular projection, video art, digital output, TV wall, cyber art, and so on.

Thirdspace
By finger-clicking on a mouse or a keyboard, soon we switch to different cyber space. The concept of digital space in which we can transcend beyond what we have experienced in the material spatial geography also subverts what we used to comprehend space. That is, it (digital space) is free to move and highly changeable.

Many scholars have employed ideas that are similar to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “rhizome” to explain internet lateral mobility and network structures. The digital space is neither “Firstspace”, the real material world, nor the “Secondspace”, which is constructed by “imagined” ideas. Instead, according to Edward W. Soja, it has the characteristic of “Thirdspace”—a place that combines both “real-and-imagined” qualities. It is “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness.” (Soja, 10)

   By appropriating images which are retrieved from urban architectural elements or street snapshots in the real city, artists then deconstruct those images to “re-present space” in the digital world. They not only create both real-and-imagined urban space, but also subvert and satirize what they have perceived in the real world through approaches such as various metamorphoses, transformation, symbolization, and displacement. Artists recreate hybrid-and-heterogeneous virtual cities that are not only paralleled to and similar to real cities but drastically different to real ones as well. Thus, these virtual cities are the re-presentation of heterogeneous Thirdspace. On one hand, virtual cities in the works reflect how urban culture in real world are challenged and contended under the wave of globalization and therefore produce an urban cultural entity that is tangled with diverse cultural heterogeneity. On the other hand, virtual cities reflect how everyone’s daily life is infiltrated by the internet in the contemporary society. Our living space no longer exists in what we have experienced in the physical material space, but, by means of internet, extends to the infinite cyber space in which we can freely construct and imagine a digital city.

Reintegration of Hybridity and Heterogeneity
Fei Cao’s Mirror and Live in RMB City are short films featuring on China Tracy, the second-life embodiment of Fei Cao in the cyber world. In Live in RMB City, through dialogues between China Tracy and her son, China Sun, the process of constructing RMB City and features of virtual cities gradually reveal. In addition, Live in RMB City divulges corresponding relations between the virtual and the real world. Beijing’s landscape is filled with hybridity and heterogeneity—a mixture of Western modern buildings and Chinese traditional architectures such as Hu Tong—because China has been undergoing a construction boom. In RMB City, a collage of diverse architectural elements from Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Western, where Fei Cao deconstructs and reiterates Beijing, which is similar to the concept of Thirdspace, there is full of artist’s personal playful sarcasm: big panda and China Network Television (CNTV) hanging in the sky, and a donut Guggenheim Museum.

There are three parts in Mirror, and it is Fei Cao’s traveling documentation in second life. The first part portrays the money-built world within Fei Cao’s mind. Although this world is fictional, it is a quite capitalized one which bears shrewd cruelty. The second part reveals true feelings that Fei Cao has in her second life. Her embodiment might be a virtual one; however, what she has committed in this world is utterly real emotion. The third part unfolds a worldview that transcends race and national boundaries. This might be a virtual world which is established by money and consumptive value, but it still attracts multiple kinds of people to visit.

In Shall We Dance Shanghai, by randomly selecting architectural cityscape that Hsin-Chien Huang extracts from different periods of Shanghai along with human-sized shapes, simultaneous interactions ensue the audience to dance with the music of old Shanghai. Architectural cityscapes in Shanghai such as classical belfries, pediments, red bricks, modern cement building, balcony, and iron-grid window altogether interweave, reiterate, and disappear with the coming and going of the audience. Architectures gather the memory of human history, and decay in the river of time. In the digital world, however, they have reincarnated through the form of human, which connect urban memories and dreams among citizens and compose a digital song of urban architectures.

A Digital Allegory in the City

In Chun-Yu Lai and Wen-Cheng Lee’s works where they narrate what they respectively have observed and introspected in relation to their situated cities, digital cities are symbolic allegories in response to real cities. Under the wave of globalization, in a modern M-shape society in which the gap between the rich and poor increase, Taiwan has been infiltrated with disparate cultures including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. As a result, these trends influence Taiwan’s development and cityscape—a mixture with cultural hybridity. In Chun-Yu Lai’s Dying Sun, sun rises from high-rise mansions, accompanied with signboards saying “Catastrophe”, “Fighting and Confliction ”, and “ Pseudo Christ Apparition”. It never occur to us that sun rising brings us nothing but explosion and apocalypse—a world that is destroyed and then reborn—which lead us to a world of iron roofs and wooden partition ghettoes. By showing contrast distributions of two urban developments, we capture the worry that the artist has toward the M-shape social structure.

Wen-Cheng Lee’s Seeing Invisible Ocean signifies the exuberant island of Taiwan which is composed of architectural elements in our daily life. When rising from pure sea-level horizon, Taiwan suddenly is engulfed by a gigantic dragon, and reborn as a great robot which then transforms into an enormous cosmic city, rising with rays of light. As for Disappeared Flora Exposition, in which a gigantic monster that is transformed from an urban architecture appears near the site of Taipei Flora Expo, it is artist’s reflection and sarcasm toward social phenomena that are caused by such an event in Taipei. Common disparate architectural elements in Taiwan cityscapes—high-rises, apartments, windows, neon light, advertisements, traffic light, bridges, and Ferris wheel—altogether are model components of a machine which acts as a transformer that, emerging from the earth and ascending the former landscape, would later become huge monsters. What rattles is the life energy that is rooted in local inhabitants, and therefore this work which is filled with hybrid cityscapes exactly portrays Taiwan.

The Spatial Transformation of Information
Marshall McLuhan asserts that any technique will gradually create a brand new human environment which represents a positive progression, instead of a pessimistic product, and will turn old environment into a man-made art form. In Micro-Signal, Tzu-Hsiu Yeh transforms electro-digital signals that are produced and broadcasted within cities into the source of light in different colors. Within a dark room, the artist establishes a fictional city continually twinkling with numerous small LED light. All kinds of IT products have entered our lives, without our consciousness, and have constituted another informational cyber space within the physical space.

In I-Chun Chen’s An Email with Pitiable Subject, You Are Attacked by Virus!, artist make an analogy between endless alleys and network spatial connections. When you surf on the internet, you might receive a Trojan Horse virus in any minute. It is likely that you would be afraid to bump into lurking robbers when loitering in maze-like streets in real urban space. Which road should you choose when standing in the many entrances which lead to different alleys? Especially once in a while an airplane flies through a girl-model, a signboard or a lantern, even a rooster, a black canine or a rhinoceros. In the age of internet, you might, through occasional hyperlinks, enter different web space in which sometimes you find things amazing, sometimes you bump into boring rubbish, and sometimes you encounter danger! Web space becomes the world that internet users are bound to explore, and it is the world that we are getting more and more familiar with. Homepage is the gate to the world. I-Chun Chen represents how she really feels with spatial elements that she retrieves in the real world.

Six artists demonstrated how they felt toward the city with urban elements that they acquired in reality; hence, they established wondrous virtual cities that were full of imagination. Who says the inexistence of a virtual city? It does really exist among our genuine feelings.

 

Work Cited
Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996. Print.