Keith Lam opened ProjectPlayaround Macau – Media Arts Exhibition and Performance “FIRSTAGE” in Macau on July 31, bringing six works into a run that lasts through August 29. The exhibition turns about a year of lectures and workshops in Macau into a public showing, but it also leaves a practical question: how far can a media arts project built on collaboration reach beyond the people already inside it?
Lam said the project is meant to “bring together professionals from different fields and have them create together through media arts.” He also described the process as one in which participants can “integrate the knowledge acquired throughout the project into their respective artistic fields,” with work that can involve “technology” without treating media art as necessarily synonymous with high technology. The project was developed in Macau over around a year through lectures and workshops before reaching FIRSTAGE.
Macau and ProjectPlayaround
ProjectPlayaround Macau – Media Arts Exhibition and Performance “FIRSTAGE” comes from a collaboration between the Macau Association of New Media Arts and ProjectPlayaround. ProjectPlayaround is led by Lam, a Hong Kong media artist, and is built around workshops, lectures, interviews, exhibitions, and community engagement initiatives that link media arts and performing arts.
The exhibition presents six works: Ecology of Post-Trauma, Under The Gaze, i’m Looking at You, Looking at Me, Damn!, Storage, and Archive of Waterborne Deities. That range gives the show its structure: instead of a single theme, it places separate works side by side and lets the collaboration itself carry the idea of what a media arts platform in Macau can look like.
Storage and Under The Gaze
Among the works, Storage centers on a monumental spiritual air-raid shelter built through media design, sound, and space supported by software. Mathew Hon said the work began with the questions “what is Storage?” and “how does inspiration come about?” He added that inspiration can emerge at any moment.
Under The Gaze starts from a behavioral practice to explore the relationship between the self and the external gaze, and it also addresses anxiety surrounding existence. That pairing matters inside a six-work exhibition because it shows the show is not presenting a single media arts method, but several different ways of turning a collaborative project into finished work.
FIRSTAGE runs through August 29, giving viewers a limited window to see the six works that came out of the yearlong Macau process. The unanswered issue now is how many people took part in the lectures and workshops, and which creators contributed to each work beyond the names already attached to the project.
