Ye Xuan | 2023 Residency
Switzerland | Visual Arts
April 15-July 12, 2023 — Visual Arts
Nationality: China
Residency location: Digital
Ye Xuan works across various contexts of art, music, and technology through research and creation. They make publications, installations and performances that synthesize language, code, sound, body, image, data, light, and time. Often involving improvisation and computation, their works make noises in meaning- becoming and worldbuilding, coupling it with the more-than-human agency in the technoecology.
The artist has been featured and exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Venice Architecture Biennale (IT), MUTEK (CA), Centre de Design de l’UQAM à Montréal (CA), Fonderie Darling (CA), Varley Art Gallery (CA), the Art Gallery of Ontario (CA), Inside-out Art Museum (CN), the Goethe-Institut (Beijing & Montreal), ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM, among others. They are the recipient of SSHRC scholarship and a finalist of 2018 EQ Bank Digital Artists Award. As a musician, they are techne agnostic and genre eclectic. They have performed at numerous experimental music festivals and DIY shows.
During the residency, they are planning to research and create around the concept of decentralized systems from the perspectives of ecology, economics and information studies. This project is inspired by the shared modes of information transmission in digital networks and the distribution of dandelions as nodes in the ecosystem. Based on the research, they are interested in developing Dandelion Vortex as a poetic and speculative spin on decentralized systems through web-based interactive experiences and telematic performances. The central infrastructure of the project will be built employing ethical practices of decentralized web technologies. The result would be a multimodal poem that attempts to evoke the more-than-human agency of these networks through text, sound, visualization, climate data (e.g. wind), and bio-feedback. They aim for this work to create a sense of connection between dispersed bodies and reimagine our relationship with one another in a (not-yet-post-) pandemic future presence. The following rendering of the project would be live networked performances. By using neurofeedback as a compositional tool, they will perform telematic compositions with musicians from Switzerland to activate the poem as a score through the exchange with institutions such as the ZHdK Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology and the Embassy of Foreign Artists’ Campus Biotech.
