R&C @CAC Project · Exhibition | Farming Instead of Mining
EXHIBITION OPENING:
2025.3.15 (Sat.) 14:00-18:00
HOURS:
11 am – 6 pm (last entry 5:30 pm)
Wednesdays – Sundays
Free Admission
Chronus Art Center (CAC) is pleased to present Farming Instead of Mining, the outcome exhibition of the Research & Creation (R&C) @CAC Project. The exhibition will open on March 15, 2025, and remain on view until May 12, 2025.
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 dominance of technological capital platforms over non-living resources, namely land, minerals, and water bodies, expanding in the pace of arms race. On the other hand, 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. Farming Instead of Mining examines the tensions between industrial agriculture and alternative farming to propose creative alternatives to the current AI development pathways and their underlying extractivist epistemes.
As the initial outcome of the project, Farming Instead of Mining_Strategy Matrix 1.0 is a card game that transforms CAC Project Space into an incubatior for collective intelligence. Players take on roles including a technology company, hacker, Huangtian Houtu, digital laborer, policymaker, user, and AI entity, drawing cards from two decks–one containing digital technology elements and the other featuring reciprocal agricultural theoretical and practical knowledge–to create strategies for tackling to a series of natural, economic, and social crises emerging from AI development. Meanwhile, as the game is played throughout the exhibition, an AI entity will continuously accumulate, analyze, and learn from players’ strategies, gradually forming an unique narrative game-based knowledge system that serves as a diverse and open-source toolbox for addressing complex social, technological, and environmental challenges. Through the cyclical process of “player-strategy-AI feedback,” Farming Instead of Mining_Strategy Matrix 1.0 weaves the power of ficiton with the entangled reality embedded in planetary-scale computation.
XI Lei
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
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).
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