Baby Love
Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. This October school holidays, CarriageWorks’ cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone.
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. Her net installation works are in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, NTT[ICC], Tokyo and the Guggenheim Museum: (Bowling Alley, 1995; Buy One Get One, 1997; and Brandon, 1998-1999).
Baby Love is an embracing interactive, kinetic and sonic experience, alluding to both past and future as the teacups evoke the nostalgia of amusement park rides and clash with the futuristic vision of cloned babies.
The public can contribute to the joyride soundtrack by uploading songs via the web at babylove.biz which go directly to the installation. The songs are transmitted wirelessly via Memory-Emotion data to the babies. When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes.
The cloned babies of Baby Love are an updated version of the central figures in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies. In the novel, twins born from lockers at a Yokohama Station spend their lives haunted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeat.
Cheang’s clones were inspired by scientific research into the development of biobots and artificial life forms. 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. Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us?
- Where
- CarriageWorks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh
- Main entrance: Cnr Codrington Street | Parking entrance: 229 Wilson Street
- Nearest train: Redfern or Mcdonaldtown
- When
- 30 September – 2 November, Monday – Saturday (closed Sundays except Sunday 30 September opening), 10am–12pm and 2pm–5pm
- More Info
- carriageworks.com.au
- Upload a song
- babylove.biz
- Also in VIC & WA
- Melbourne experimenta.org | Perth awesomearts.com