WOW! CCAA^1 is an archival visualisation collaboratively developed by Cedar Zhou and Iris Long. It explores how data visualisation fits into contemporary exhibition/museum knowledge transfer and aesthetic experience. WOW! CCAA is composed of two parts: a looping seven-minute sequence of programmed frameworks, and a visitor interaction mechanism called CCAA Now, projected onto a 35-metre-long corridor in Shanghai Power Station of Art. While the physical corridor links exhibition spaces, the piece enlarges this central linking area into a virtual, three- dimensional space where visitors can walk into and enter into conversation.
A 15-year archive of Chinese contemporary art is translated into four visual movements with embedded narratives. The archive’s contents are simultaneously components of visual forms and representational information addressing four analytical aspects. Via interactive technologies, WOW! CCAA further absorbs visitors’ on-site responses to exhibited artworks, which ‘fly’ into the tunnel and interconnect with historical CCAA jury texts. By letting visitors become ‘actively involved’1, WOW! CCAA is a living archive that engages with the ‘now’, while also exploring how Lev Manovich’s ‘paradigm – syntagm^2’ relationship can be structurally developed.
CCAA: China Contemporary Art Award
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 203.
