The opening of this exhibition is originally planned on May 29th, 2021. To comply with the epidemic prevention measures of the government, the exhibition schedule will be rearranged. For further information, please stay tuned to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum official website.
Program X-site is an annual event that solicits proposals for art projects to be exhibited in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum outdoor plaza. In 2021, the project Booom room by Overrun Guerrilla Act. x Arch For Real was chosen from a pool of thirty-one proposals.
Responding to this year's theme of X-Reality, the artists chose to consider the feeling of doom brought by post-industrial architecture and to use sound as a building material to create a synesthetic experience. The team created a tower shaped vessel that stores energy and simulates explosions with light waves, sound, and vibrations. The accumulation of these events and their physical energy create a dynamic game-like ambient zone. Audiences will be able to experience the structure through the different senses of touch, sight, and hearing.
General Concept
The general concept for this year's X-site project Booom room is based on the letter “X” of the program's title, which suggests a boundless, unknown variable. With Booom room, the collaborators have launched a thorough investigation of possibilities with regard to energy expansion and the traversal of space in a set of installations that radiate from the center of TFAM's outdoor plaza. Providing a visual focal point at the center of the various installations, a structure resembling a nuclear power plant cooling tower serves as a metaphor for our worry about and quest for energy. Furthermore, invisible, heterogeneous sound waves are generated that vibrate the space and expand the borders of perception.
Vessel: Apocalyptic Architecture as Energy Carrier
A vessel possesses the functions of storing, preserving, and hiding. As a kind of vessel, architecture contains people, things, and invisible energy. In this project, the collaborators have constructed a post-industrial architectural vessel with an eschatological atmosphere, and used invisible energy to create an ambient zone that opens bodily perceptions. With the production of sounds and a series of reactions associated with explosions, the project simulates an energy implosion, and with structures, sounds, lights, and vibrations, ultimately forms a unique spatial experience.
Explosions: Explosive Shock Waves Traveling through Space
An explosion is a shock wave generated by an interaction between reactive materials and with extremely high kinetic energy. The remnants left at the site of the explosion lead to either the fall or rebirth of a civilization. In the space constructed for this project, collaborators have simulated the shock wave generated by an explosion with noise that leads to the disturbance. The waves spread through the structure so that visitors can perceive the changing vibrations. A unique ambient zone is created by both the physical presence of the structure at the site, as well as the main part and fragments that contain the explosion, light waves, sounds, and resonance. Fluctuations in the concentration and dispersal of energy create liminal spaces that can be sensed.
Art: A Spatial Topology of Multiple Sensations
Through the emission of waves and the removal of physical space limitations, the structure amplifies the perceptual field of visitors. Waves make it possible for visitors to perceive unbounded wave zones in a limited space, and in turn, create many possible compound perceptions. Art related activities further expand the significance of the explosion, bring out sensory topology that transcends space, and establish new dynamic relationships between people and spaces.
Through interdisciplinary practice, Booom room explores the territory beyond space in a contemporary art venue. As visitors enter the field and encounter multiple sensory situations, sound waves and vibrations spread energy to produce specific unexpected orders via continuous fluctuation. In this way, the work responds to the multiple realities theme of this year's program.
Overrun Guerrilla Act. and Arch For Real
OGA, Overrun guerrilla act.
OGA engages in activist art and is composed of contemporary artists, critics, curators, and other art professionals who are members of the under 40 generation. Like art groups from all over the world, OGA responds to contemporary phenomena arising in the areas of art, culture and society, and based on this forms action units of artists to develop art linkages.
OGA redefines the idea of an art group by using “trans-” as its code name for action. As such, translating, trans-linking, and trans-disciplinarity events have become our core axis of development. Using active and dynamic forms, we hope to establish art activities as sources of cultural movements, and artists into disruptors whose fluctuations and ripples encourage people to reset themselves so that they can once again pursue the essence of art. We also hope that the subjective agency of art groups will return art to its cultural origin and generate changes in global consciousness.
A4R, Arch For Real
A4R is a professional architectural team composed of National Cheng Kung University Department of Architecture students Yen-Fu Lin, Rhea Hwang, and Bing-Hao Xie. Focused on the practice of architecture, the team continually experiments with new concepts, such as divorcing the energy of art and culture from the invisible realm of thought, and implementing it in reality by making it a tangible and perceptible spatial experience and thus constructing reality. In addition to its focus on the transformation of the abstract into the tangible, the team also responds to contemporary social contexts through its use of materials, structure, and space, and uses different entry points to combine non-architectural elements and expand the possibilities of expression with respect to real construction. The team hopes that under a condensed and diversified collection of elements, a deeper level of interaction between architecture and people will be opened, and behavioral experiences with strong connections will be shaped.
Team Members
Head of Project: Chieh-Sen CHIU
Architect: Hung-Hsuan SHEN
OGA: Chieh-Sen CHIU, Sheng-Hsiung HUNG, Chih-Wei CHIU, Cheng-Tse WU, Margot GUILLEMOT
A4R: Yen-Fu LIN, Rhea HWANG, Bing-Hao XIE
Special thanks to: Born Free Inc., Huacai Opto-Electronics Co., Ltd., Zuo Dong Co., Ltd.