This week’s Collective meeting
This week our Collective had a group meeting to discuss topic selection and future plans. We decided that each person would come up with a topic and then vote on the choice.
The topic I proposed was:
Collapsing Realities
Topics:
The Cracking and Disappearing of Reality: when reality collapses, what is left?
When the boundaries of reality are torn apart and order is destroyed, what do we see? Are there fragments in the ruins, or a new world hidden in the cracks? Under the theme of ‘’Collapsing Realities‘’, the exhibition attempts to explore the instability of reality, and how we can find meaning in the remaining fragments when reality collapses.
Possible Paths to Explore
1. Reality Dislocation:
Reality may seem stable, but if certain details are slightly shifted (e.g. mirror images are no longer symmetrical, familiar objects are distorted or disappear), the viewer may begin to doubt the reality.
Curatorial Practice:
Breaking the physical logic within the exhibition space (e.g. distorted floors, disappearing walls, mirror mazes).
Glitch Art: Instability of image, sound, light, creating a sense of ‘system breakdown’.
2.Disruption of time:
Time is usually seen as continuous, but if we create time dislocations or loops in the exhibition, the sense of reality will be torn apart.
Curatorial practice:
The overlapping of images from different time zones allows the past and the future to coexist.
Let certain parts of the exhibition disappear, dissolve and collapse over time (e.g. a fading canvas, or a space that closes down completely on the last day of the exhibition).
3. The disappearance of the audience:
If reality collapses, do we ourselves disappear? Exhibitions can create an experience of ‘disappearance’ for the viewer, allowing them to realise that their own existence is also unstable.
Curatorial Practice:
The use of sensing devices that prevent the viewer from seeing their own image in certain spaces (e.g. walking into a room where the mirror no longer reflects them).
Dynamic exhibitions: works or spaces that ‘hide’ or ‘disappear’ in response to the movement of the viewer.
The exhibition is not just trying to create a sense of doom, but to explore the deeper question: when the structure of the reality we rely on disintegrates, what can we still believe in?
🔸 Finding a new order in the cracks – The collapse of reality may mean the disappearance of the old framework, but it also creates space for new possibilities. In the exhibition, the viewer is not a passive recipient, but part of the reconstruction of reality.
🔸 Reality is subjective – when the single narrative of reality is destroyed, we realise that reality is actually a patchwork of countless individual experiences. This curatorial approach allows each viewer to experience a different reality, emphasising the plurality of reality.
🔸 Finding resonance in instability – Reality collapsing is not an end point, but a state of flow. Through interactive installations, collaborative creations, and open spaces, the audience is made to feel that reality is not certain and unchanging, but an existence in constant flux.
What we ended up voting for was another student’s proposal:
Theme: Who defines “reality”?
The purpose of the exhibition: With the concept of “reality” as the central point of discussion, from the emergence of the Kaleidoscope to today’s digital age, how do human beings continuously structure their cognition and presentation of reality through visual technological tools? This exhibition sets aside the true and false judgments of binary opposites, takes the connection between power, technology and perception as the main clue, and uses artworks as the voice carrier to discuss how the definition of “reality” is constantly transferred in the iteration of visual media.
Exhibition framework:
(1) Starting with the zoetrope and the kaleidoscope, it presents humanity’s ambition to “fake dynamic vision” through mechanical devices for the first time during the Industrial Revolution – the zoetrope simulates the movement of life with cyclic film, and the kaleidoscope tames chaotic matter with geometric order. These low-tech media expose the manipulability of the “real” and become the original genes of modern virtual technology.
(2) By comparing the interaction logic of the physical peephole of the 19th century peephole with the contemporary mobile phone screen, the nature of technological media’s “framing” of human perception is revealed: the audience is forced to receive information in a fixed perspective (such as a short vertical video) and a preset rhythm (such as an algorithm recommendation).
(3) Types of expected artworks: mechanical power devices, AI-generated art, participatory interactive art experiments
My thoughts on this idea are: who is deciding what we see?
1️⃣ Reality is manipulated from a variety of sources, including technology, power, history, and perception.
2️⃣ The world we see may not be uniquely real, but filtered and shaped.
3️⃣ In the face of manipulation, we can choose to resist, co-exist, or create new ways of seeing.
Through this exhibition we hope to reveal the invisible workings of visual power and invite the viewer to consider – how do we regain control of our reality? 💡
