The Lumen Prize, a global award and tour for digital art will open its first show in Beijing on November 25 at Today Art Museum. The exhibition will showcase more than 20 artworks including still image, installations, and VR works. Alongside award winning  artworks from the 2017 Lumen Prize - including this year’s Gold Award winner Plastic Reflectic - past years’ prize winners and finalists are also presented. In a special section of the show, a Virtual Reality theatre will be displayed, thanks to the support of the Renaissance Company.

This exhibition is part of the sixth annual Lumen Prize global tour, following shows in the UK and preceding an exhibition in St Petersburg, Russia. Entitled Lumen Matrix, this year’s Asian leg of the tour opens in Beijing. Matrix, a mathematical term, stands for a rectangular array of numbers arranged in rows and columns. The mathematical concept is widely adopted in handling data and categorizing a set of relevant numbers.

“With the invention of the computer and its binary language, massive matrices formed by 0 and 1 became regularly exposed to scrutiny. In this Digital Age constituted of codes and digits, human beings are thoroughly entrapped in the world of matrices.” Wang Yan, the curator, comments. “Matrices build up a virtual world and technology. In the physical world, high synergy and consistency generated by ‘artificial intelligence’, together with information disseminated in velocity, catch human civilization between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

The 2017 Lumen Prize Gold Award was awarded toPlastic Reflectican interactive mirrored installation, created by Dutch artist Thijs Biersteker in collaboration with The Plastic Soup Foundation. The installation is made up of 601 pieces of plastic waste collected from oceans in different parts of the world. In Biersteker’s work, when audiences approach a dark pond of water, where plastic debris is floating, the waste will appear and form silhouettes in accordance with their postures. The installation brings plastic waste that was once cast out to sea to the feet of the spectator, compelling them to rethink the reciprocal relationship between humans and nature.

The exhibition displays work by artists with different styles from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Through diverse media, including video, still image, interactive installation, sculpture, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, participating artists ruminate on widely-debated issues facing our age, including marine pollution, privacy, superintelligence, refugee crisis, and much more.

In the “Special VR Theatre”, kindly supported by Beijing Renaissance Company, visitors are invited into an immersive experience through VR movies of exceptional visual effects. Screenings include:The Dream Collectorby Pinta Studios,The Night Cafeby Borrowed Light VR,Allumetteby Penrose Studios,Raising a Ruskusby Joshua Wassung.

The show also features a work,Danae, a work by Elena Gubanova, co-curator of Cyberfest, and a director of CYLAND MediaArtLab is one of Russia’s most active New Media art non-profit organizations. CYLAND houses the largest archive of Eastern European video art online, organizes exhibits around the world and is the force behind CYBERFEST (Russia’s largest annual New Media art event.) held at The Russian Academy of Arts. The Lumen Prize has partnered with Cyland earier this year and will be travelling to CyberFest 11 in February 2018.

During the exhibition, the public are invited to participate in a variety of events including workshops, performances, and cross-media activities. The exhibition runs through January 7, 2018.

Artists:Thijs Biersteker (Netherland),  Nicole Ruggiero / Molly Soda / Refrakt (United States / Germany), Michelle & Uri Kranot (Denmark), Lien-cheng Wang (Taiwan), Mathias Dorfelt (United States), Zarah Hussain (United Kingdom), Fabio Dartizio (Italy),  Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm (Denmark),  Will Hurt (United Kingdom), Stefan Reiss (Germany), Carla Chan (Hong Kong), CYLAND Media Art Lab / Elena Gubanova / Ivan Govorkov(Russia), David Glicksman & Moses Journey (United States), Seeeklab (China), Zheng Da (China), Damien Borowik (United Kingdom), Fabrizio Augusto Poltronieri (Brazil)