Publication

"Hylozoism" – the doctrine that all matter has life – is an unlikely head word to be seen on an exhibition poster. It does trigger the curiosity of passers-by to find out what it is all about.

"Hylozoism: An Arts & Technology Exhibition" is a landmark exhibition of media art that depicts the new ecology co-created by humans and machines. According to co-curator Joel Kwong, the idea that all things in the world possess a distinct spiritual essence invites us to look at matters with new lens. At the master lecture held at the
launch of the exhibition, she shared interesting works from the past few years that inspired her to take a deeper look into a "neo-nature" inhabited by ubiquitous technologies, and how it intertwines with human lives through arts.

Keith Lam, co-curator and commissioned artist of this exhibition, showed this intricate relationship through his "TTTV Garden". Lam's work mimics the spectrum of LED lights used in indoor vertical farming. Through learning and analysing the motions and the colour spectrum of the 24-hour news, the computer simulation transmits and televises such data on the overhead screen in "TTTV Garden", making it the "sky" that not only feeds information to the public, but also provides lights for the plants in the
environment.

All five installations in this exhibition discuss a topic related to nature – not Mother Nature as we know it, but a neo nature under the intervention of technology. "F10ra 0" (pronounced as "flora-zero" ), for example, imagines how artificial intelligence interprets the interplay of existence and essence.

"The installation is backed by in-depth research on the Bauhinia x Blakeana Dunn, the first Bauhinia tree discovered in Hong Kong," shared Ellen Pau at an open forum hosted for the exhibition. By converting the DNA file of the species into sound, Pau hopes to connect viewers to the genome study on the city flower of Hong Kong.

Matters in the neo nature may be tangible like the plants explored in the works of Lam and Pau, or they can be intangible like the electromagnetic waves emitted by the mobile devices that we carry everywhere. "Sensing Streams 2022 – invisible, inaudible" is an installation equipped with an antenna to collect real-time electromagnetic waves and then encodes the data through a selfluminous, high-definition screen and speakers.

The wavelength frequency can be changed with a controller to manipulate various simultaneously existing, perpetually changing electromagnetic waves. This work presents the flow of a multitude of electromagnetic waves, a phenomenon that usually goes unnoticed. Through this installation, viewers can see how smartphones, radios and other devices brought into the venue affect the data collected by the setup.

What if humans co-create with machines? "Artificial Botany" is set to answer this pressing question.

Before the invention of photography, physicists, pharmacists, and botanical scientists could only rely on botanical illustrations for identification, analysis, and classification. "Artificial Botany" collects botanical illustrations from public domain archives and then runs them by the machine learning system GAN (Generative Adversarial Network)
to create new morphed images extremely similar to the originals. The interpretation of the learned data aims to create a new system of relationships between colours, shapes, details, and textures that are new and independent from the previous ones, letting the possibility of new species, classes, and morphologies emerge.

"Grove" is a gathering place that paints the creators' vision for an inclusive, open building, which answers the question of the interdependence and symbiosis of human and technology.

Exhibited at Venice Biennale in 2021, the visual projection and audio environment is the work of the Living Architecture Systems Group, led byUniversity of Waterloo professor and Canadian architect Philip Beesley, and many collaborators. The possibility of living in a world of continuous growth and endless transformation is explored.