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Memory Coexistence: the artworks of the collective
Memory Coexistence stems from the experience of the City Digital Skin Art festival, a project that promotes digital art as a large participatory event, held in various cities across Asia and Europe. While the CDSA Festival 2025 continues to bring digital art to urban public spaces, using the LED surfaces of cities, Memory Coexistence shifts this research to the museum space, thus creating a dialogue between the public and institutional environments.
The exhibition, curated by Yuelai Ruan, Susa Pop, Maria Grazia Mattei, and Dominique Moulon, showcases a significant collection of works by collectives and individual artists. The works address the theme of memory as one of the anthropological cornerstones of the technological age. The thesis is that memory has a very private, intimate dimension. But it is also a universal set, accessed intuitively.
There are four sections to the narrative: ‘Sensory Resonance and Bodily Memory’, ‘Intelligent Regeneration of Natural Memory’, ‘Construction of Historical and Cultural Memory’, and ‘Collective Emotions through Technology’.
LOUNGE
A Right Hand That Has Lost Its Grace – An imperfectly shaped right hand lies motionless. Next to it, a comma-shaped light bulb flashes gently. What feeling emerges when these two silent fragments meet?
Like a Flower – This series of artificially colored portraits dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, now collected by public channels on the Internet, are a model of “beauty” from that era, representing the characteristics of people at a specific moment in time and a reminder of history. This method of artificially coloring and tracing photos is intended to beautify the image. Their faces suggest that the difference between photos and real identities is that “photos, not the world, have become the standard of beautiful things.” This also means that photos have a certain relationship with this society, that is, they reflect the collective spirit, will, and control of a country. The work intercepts time and restores memory, allowing people to have a clearer understanding of the passing of time, and also awakens a kind of self-awareness of emotions and values.
Origin – This work explores in depth the relationship between technology and nature, virtual and real, touching on the invisible reflections that accompany humanity’s continuous evolution and self-awareness. A 3-meter-high LED screen stands vertically, piercing the axis between sky and earth. Inside the screen, fluid images, generated by AIGC intelligence, unfold like an invisible consciousness, growing and reinterpreting themselves endlessly through time and space. Attached to the screen is a black structural form, echoing the eternal tension between earth and void. Here, technology is not just a tool, but the awakening of another form of life. Upon entering the work, viewers are immersed in a silent dialogue about origins, memory, and the future, perceiving the fragile glow of existence where the virtual and the real converge.
Best of CDSA
Confluence – Confluence, a performance art piece that intertwines live performance, wearable installations, and video, has a deeply personal meaning. It is the manifestation of a ritual devised by the artist. As she wove padlocks into her hair, the artist sought to dissolve the boundaries between herself and the “outside world.” This performance is a bold exploration of the interface between reality and non-reality, stimulating a discourse on the interaction between objects and emotions. The work is inspired by the traditional Chinese zodiac culture of the “Lunar New Year.” During the Lunar New Year, elders often say that it will be an “unlucky year,” meaning that there may be misfortune. For this reason, people tie a red string around their bodies and children wear peacock-shaped amulets for protection. As humans, we are a mixture of the material and the spiritual. We often project our emotions and ideas onto common objects, infusing them with a spiritual essence that, in turn, influences ourselves. In this section, the artist explores the symbiotic relationship between humans and objects that carry emotions and ideas, as well as the deep connection between humans and the outside world when viewed through the lens of these projected ideas.
GALLERY 1
Dancing with the Cosmos – In Dancing with the Cosmos, the scene centers on an empty virtual space with a silver mechanical arm in the center. This mechanical arm is the most common type of small industrial robotic arm found in modern factories, upgraded with a precision manipulator, representing the union between intelligent technology and dance with the golden dragon, suggesting the integration of contemporary technology with ancient culture and civilization. This integration can activate new forces, realizing the heritage and innovation of human civilization and sustainable development in the future. In this digital short film, the audience can experience the magical feeling of dancing with the dragon, which, when activated, dances freely as an infinite symbol among the cosmic planets. With the romantic tone of the oriental dragon dance, it blesses humanity, wishing for the cessation of conflicts and struggles, peace, and development.
The Missing Pixel – The absence of photoreceptor cells in the “optic disc” at the center of the human retina creates a physiological blind spot in our field of vision. However, just as we unconsciously ignore our nose in our field of vision, the brain automatically fills in these physiological visual gaps. The artist has designed a wearable device that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to track the user’s eye movements, digitally capturing and removing images corresponding to the blind spot of the eye. This simulates raw visual data, unprocessed and unmodified by the brain, or what our eyes actually “see.” As digital technology increasingly becomes a prosthetic extension of our bodies, it forces us to reexamine ancient philosophical questions: the objectivity of the world versus subjective human perception, and how we construct meaning through cognition.
Pastoral Light Plan – “Pastoral Light” is an art project for public spaces launched by Zheng Jing in 2022. Its first phase took place from July to August 2022, during which the artist conducted field research and creative actions in the Dunhuang region. In August 2023, the second phase, “Pastoral Light: Lingdingyang,” was realized in a marine environment, expanding the spatial dimension of the project into oceanic territories. In 2025, the next series, “Human Utopias,” will kick off the global chapter of Pastoral Light, promoting an artistic methodology rooted in nomadism, primordial form, and imagination as an immediate medium, imagining the future of the planet through an art of movement, light, and speculative thought. Every era needs a renewed light to polish its monuments, just as the utopian spirit is never an escape from reality, but a flower of hope that blooms from the soil of hardship. Through Zheng Jing’s work, we transcend time and space to witness a shared human desire for a better life, across cultures, histories, and geographies.
GALLERY 2
Tracing AI – The artist creates digital architectures left to decay, overgrown with wild vegetation. The essence of his projects lies in the creation of a porous boundary between digital and material reality. The artist is developing a craftsmanship aimed at deepening the transition from AI matter to b8 matter by perfecting machine-assisted techniques. The use of a pen plotter allows creations derived from artificial intelligence (or generative algorithms) to be materialized in a tangible form, made of ink and paper.
Unique Windscape – Wind is the breath of the sky and the earth: intangible but perceptible, formless but traceable. It transcends the boundaries of time and form, establishing an eternal dialectic between movement and immobility, presence and absence. When technology becomes a means of perceiving nature, can we use data as a brush to redraw the spirit of the landscape? It is not a matter of replicating nature, but of creating a second nature built on technological data. The audience, positioned in the gap between data and reality, is invited to reconsider the definition of “reality.” The exhibition is presented through a live-streamed virtual space, where the audience interacts in real time with the data and the work itself, perceiving the second nature and space-time memory of traditional Chinese landscape painting.
GALLERY 3
BLOOM NGC 5457 – A colossus measuring 170,000 light-years across, it shatters space-time into spiral steles with its silent and thunderous revolution at 200 km per second. Each thread of its light is an emissary traveling for 21 million years through the void. Although stellar dust will erase the explorer’s tracks, that single moment when it looked into the abyss opened the eyes of the nulliverse.
Coexistence of Memories: The Art of Interaction between Biological Memory and Digital Memory – This work explores the coexistence of human biological memory and digital memory. Using an electroencephalographic (EEG) induction device, it captures the audience’s biological memories and converts them into visual forms of digital memory. Each participant can input their own memory fragments into the system by wearing an EEG device, generating personalized memory images that are integrated into the overall design. As more viewers participate, the entire work will continue to evolve, forming a dynamically growing memory network that demonstrates the possibilities of the joint development of memory and technology. This work aims to explore how the two memories influence each other and ultimately achieve coexistence.
IMMERSIVE ROOM
Virtual Nature Study – Virtual Nature Study is an eco-aesthetic experiment that challenges anthropocentric views by focusing on speculative models of natural evolution not dominated by humans. It emphasizes a symbiotic and interdependent relationship between biological forms, technology, and the environment. Using digital transformation, the project creates intersections between the human and natural realms. The goal is to evoke a deep emotional resonance with nature, encouraging harmonious coexistence between human activities and natural ecosystems. Ultimately, the project envisions a sustainable and symbiotic future that transcends species boundaries.
Symphony – Symphony is a digital video installation that explores collaborative relationships and dynamic balance, inspired by the polyphonic structures of symphonic music. Within the spatial environment, the viewer finds themselves immersed in a silent symphony composed of shapes, lights, shadows, and material textures. Each element functions like a musical note: autonomous but resonating within a larger architectural rhythm. Rather than presenting harmony as a final state, Symphony imagines an ever-evolving order of coexistence.
Luminous Icons: Echoes in the Sacred Grottoes – “Searching for caves and creating statues” is a very ancient myth that, due to its complex connotations, ordinary people can no longer experience. The combination of digital art and mixed reality technology allows cultural heritage to be protected and passed on. In this immersive experience, AI digital simulation technology is used for the first time to show, through hyper-realistic digital artistic content, the historical scenes represented by ancient temples and relics such as the Dunhuang Mogao caves, the Yungang caves, and many other places. Under the guidance of a little monk, the viewer can travel through ancient and modern time and space.
Unbounded: Future Garden – Although the rapid development of society has brought enormous benefits to humanity, the ecological environment has suffered serious damage and people’s ecological awareness has gradually awakened. The central concept of the work is boundlessness, which means eliminating the dividing line between people and plants and making them a continuous existence. In this “garden of the future,” plants and humans come together in a symbiotic relationship, creating an artistic space that transcends the boundaries between man and nature.
Return of the South – The work is inspired by the unique meteorological phenomenon of the “Return of the South Wind” in southern China. Every time spring and winter alternate, the southern region suddenly becomes hot and cold, humidity increases significantly, the weather becomes cloudy and sunny, and the rain is incessant. Based on this, the artist attempts to use immersive digital space to allow the body to merge with nature, feeling the humidity of the outside world blossoming in the senses and cognition of the body.
Coexistence & World-Creation – Forest Shadows · The Whisper of Trees – The work is a virtual digital art project that blends nature, the essence of Chinese Zen philosophy, and images generated by AIGC. It explores the potential for coexistence between the digital and natural realms. The monumental images of slowly moving trees are an ethereal projection generated by the fusion of computational modeling and artificial intelligence, representing the presence of sentient entities. Modern optical forms reveal inner perceptions, amplifying the visual expression of ancient tree structures, or perhaps approaching illusion or hallucination. As if emerging from invisible ink, computers and artificial intelligence translate these abstract concepts into elegant and intriguing works.
Clear and Distant View of Streams and Mountains – A cyber-Chinese artistic experiment explores the “ethereal transcendence” of Southern Song Dynasty landscape painting, skillfully blending the treasures of Italian civilization with the profound wisdom of traditional Chinese pagodas. Inspired by cyberpunk aesthetics, this project creates a surreal world where reality and virtuality intertwine, delicately interpreting the dialogue, resonance, and enduring friendship between ancient Chinese and Italian civilizations. Technology fuels tradition, creating a profound cultural and technological symbiosis. As viewers move through this realm where reality and illusion overlap, they witness the rebirth and fusion of Chinese and Italian heritage in the digital world, understanding how technology breathes new life into ancient cultures and, at the same time, how profound cultural heritage infuses even cold technology with humanistic warmth.
Landscape Theater – The work spans the past and present, shedding new light on classic paintings that have lost their brilliance over time. Using modern technology, the paintings come to life, going beyond simple movement: they pursue the ideal of Eastern painting. The original spirit of the work, revitalized by light, is transformed into a modern language that communicates empathy and a timeless message. The artist’s goal is to promote cultural democracy, where art is accessible to all, freeing works from the limitations of institutions and traditional systems, allowing them to shine in the digital light.
The Bloom of Mei Lanfang – This work integrates digital art with Peking Opera performances, reinterpreting Mei Lanfang’s classic operatic pieces through a new visual language. Using digital technology, the stylized movements of Peking Opera are captured and transformed, condensing them into dynamic digital images. The work aims to reinterpret the essence of traditional culture through contemporary digital media.
Landscape: Verdant Southland – The work transforms Zhuangzi’s philosophy, particularly the concept of “Qiwu” (the equality of things: “Nature and I were born together; all things and I are one.”), into an aesthetic language, creating a poetic visual experience across multiple screens. The philosophy of “Qiwu” explores the possibility of egoless existence, seeking harmony between the internal and external worlds. In this context, the “landscape” is not only a tangible element, but also a symbolic one, representing the essence of this greater “Self”: a channel that unites the human and the sacred, a realm where the mind and the material world merge. The work attempts to harmonize seemingly distant elements: mountain forests with urban spaces, vegetation with human life.
Echoes, Whispers and Memories
METAMORPH – Inspired by Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” the experience presents a dystopian vision of humanity awakening beyond the horizon. The show explores the increasingly blurred boundary between humanity and technology, leading to a world of uncertainty.
