Baby Love (Shu Lea Cheang)
October 16th 2007 01:40
Adapted from the website: --
The year is 2030. Biobot cloned babies with genes from deep sea Okinawa pearls are bred in coin lockers in Tokyo train stations. The babies are entrusted to receive, store, and transmit human memory and emotion (ME data). But the babies revolt against their "mirrored self" status...
"Baby Love" puts humans and baby clones together in a nostalgic fairground joyride -- gliding through space, gently spinning -- combining past and future, tea and sympathy, love and ME-motion. The public can upload MP3 love songs to a database, from which they are transmitted by wireless network to the babies. The babies receive this ME data, play it back, shuffle it, and jam it, leaving the humans to sort through the jumble. When eventually one teacup crashes into another, the babies exchange ME data with each other, reprocess it, and broadcast the remix on the web.
Ryu Murakami (1952-)
The project is based on Ryu MurakamI's novel Coin Locker Babies (1980), in which two twin boys are abandoned at birth at Yokohama Station and grow up haunted with the sound of human heartbeats.
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| BABY LOVE
RIDE ME TENDER Baby Love is a sensitive interactive wi-fi mobile artwork. Baby Love is not a ride. Baby Love is designed to be driven gently. Baby Love is fragile and delicate. Please make sure you treat the art work with kindness and respect. Anyone who does not respect the art work will be asked to leave. |
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Meet Blue Baby.
Meet Cyan Baby.
Meet Green Baby.
Meet Orange Baby.
Meet Red Baby.
Orange
Red
Orange
Yellow
Cyan
Cyan
Yellow
Red
Blue
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Further reading
Shu Lea Cheang (1954-)
-- CarriageWorks website -- "Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song... This October school holidays, CarriageWorks’ cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups... Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production... When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes... It is an installation which fuses nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age without boggling interactive technology and our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet."
-- Sydney Morning Herald -- "in each garishly coloured cup sits a dummy-sucking baby doll with no eyes, hands or feet... Despite the apparent flippancy of her work, Cheang is one of the world's most highly regarded digital artists. Her works have been commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum, and Baby Love has already exhibited in Tokyo, Taiwan, Melbourne and New York."
-- Fuller synopsis and discussion of porn movie.
-- Artist interview (below): "The piece is really about memory and emotion and how memory and emotion get stored and then retrieved". There are also (boring) Youtube videos of the babies at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, and at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
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