CAC Project 2nd Installment
Farming Instead of Mining
Chronus Art Center
2nd Floor, Building 11, No.50 Mo Gan Shan Rd, Shanghai
Artists: XI Lei, Aven Le Zhou
Residency Duration: 2024.11.8 – 2025.1
Exhibition: 2025.1 - 2025.2
Open Studio:2024.11.8 15:00 - 18:00
HOURS:11 am – 6 pm (last entry 5:30 pm) Wednesdays – Sundays
Free Admission
Chronus Art Center (CAC) is pleased to announce the second installment of Research & Creation (R & C) @CAC Project. From November 8, 2024, through January 2025, resident artists XI Lei and Aven Le Zhou will conduct field research and investigations for their project Farming Instead of Mining, engaging in dialogues with farmers and scientists in and around Shanghai. During the residency, the CAC Project space will transform from an exhibition venue into an open studio and archive space that presents the research process. Meanwhile, CAC will host a series of exchange activities and events to advance the project, along with public programs to support CAC’s knowledge dissemination mission. The residency outcomes will be exhibited at CAC Project space between January and February 2025.
<About the Project>
We are increasingly aware of the steep energy costs behind a system with boundless generative potential. From the massive electricity consumption and carbon emissions required to support large language model platforms, to the billions of gallons of water needed to cool servers in data centers, and the e-waste shipped to peripheral areas of the global political-economic arena, all reflect the “sacred” rights that technological capital platforms claim over non-living resources, namely land, minerals, and water bodies. The radiance of expansion no longer comes from divinity but from the alluring metallic sheen of 1990s California, enduring under techno-chauvinism.
As a critical resource in AI development, internet data has been intentionally severed from everyday narratives and personal rights since the early 21st century. Data, filled with traces of life and memory, is treated as a social means of production for system optimization. Terms like “data mining,” “data prospecting,” “data drilling,” and “data cleaning” further imply an extractivist narrative and mentality threading the relationship between technology and the planet.
Following the first residency of the R&C @CAC Project, LLMscape: A Technolinguistic Exploration of Climate Narratives by Gottfried Haider & Zhang Jie, which explored how the contingency and collectiveness inherent in large language models shape the technological processes of virtual entities,Farming Instead of Mining attempts to deviate from AI development models. XI Lei and Avan Le Zhou will examine the tensions between industrial agriculture and alternative farming to propose creative alternatives to current computational methods and their underlying extractivist epistemes.
<About the Arists>
XI Lei, an artist and researcher, teaches at the School of Communication & Design at the China Academy of Art. He holds a PhD in Artistic Research from the University of Arts and Design Linz, Austria, and previously served as an assistant professor (German: Universitätsassistent) at the same institution. He was a DOC fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a visiting research associate at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). He explores how art can draw inspiration from local knowledge, providing new insights for ecological awareness and technological thinking. His work is often presented as interdisciplinary artistic research projects that span various fields, including cultural studies, media studies, computer science, heritage studies, anthropology, and environmental humanities, as well as across multiple media, such as video, animation, sound, text, installation, painting, and drawing. In these projects, theory and artistic practice are always dynamically intertwined. He is also a writer of art review and theory.
Aven Le Zhou is an artist-scholar whose research is anchored in the expansive fields of Art & Technology and Computational Media Arts. His practice-based research meanders through techno-chauvinism and Luddism to be diligent in technodiversity and critically examine the sociocultural and ecological dimensions of technological advancements through interactive art. His work is centralized on embodied interaction, bodily embodiment, and their entanglement with emerging technological media, such as generative artificial intelligence, embodied intelligence, and spatial computing.
Aven’s interactive artworks have been exhibited internationally, with venues including Linz, Austria; Paris, France; Vancouver and Montreal, Canada; Seoul, South Korea; Izmir, Turkey; and Shanghai and Hangzhou, China. He has published within prominent art and technology communities, contributing to journals and conferences such as Leonardo, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and ARTECH, as well as in creative art tracks (art galleries or workshops) at major AI conferences like NeurIPS, CVPR, and ICCV. He has been an assistant professor and director of the Interactive Experience Lab at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University since 2020 and is currently a Ph.D. Researcher in Computational Media and Arts at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou).
