Exhibitions
2024.10.5 - 2025.5.31

Wuhan Biennale 2024 “Future Coding: Signals of the Sentient”

2024.10.5 – 2025.5.31
Wuhan Art Museum
Artists: CAO Shu, DING Shiwei, Disnovation.org, Libby Heaney, Joey Holder, Martin Howse, HU Rui, knowbotiq, LI Jiabao, LUO Shuang, MIAO Ying, Yuri Pattison, QIU Yu, SHI Zheng, WANG Changcun, WANG Yueyue, WU Ziyang & Mark Ramos, Marcel Zaes, ZHOU Yan

Curated by CAC, the “Future Coding: Signals of the Sentient” section of the Wuhan Biennale 2024 explores a form of perception that blends biological wetware, mineral hardware, and digital and environmental energies. The fluidity inherent in the digital echoes the flow of water, suggesting an intrinsic relationship between the digital and the natural. This section investigates the role of coding and transcoding in activating the perceptions, emotions, and energies of diverse entities. The works selected under this theme re-examine the ontology of life influenced by social relations and technologies, through various media and rich forms of expression. They illustrate connections that transcend time and spatial scales, extending beyond human entities, and expound an ecological aesthetic imbued with planetary thinking and a material-digital-spiritual trinity. These artistic practices also imagine how beings of different substrates undergo trans-material transformations through the communication and infiltration of coding and transcoding, thereby establishing deeper connections and understandings between them.
While focusing on the pervasive sentience present in all things and how human and non-human entities constitute a generative, fluid systemic relationship, this section also attempts to rethink the processes of life, the artificial, and the spiritual in a society undergoing technological shifts, developing a co-evolving imagination within a new ethical-aesthetic paradigm.