The big picture of bits and bytes

Other exhibits, such as Syer the Posthuman, a digital human presented by Yu Zhen, the exhibition's curator and who is an artist and architect, are also interactive. The audience can talk to the digital human, which appears on a huge screen supported by a metallic arm, via microphone. Yu and his team began developing a digital being in 2020. Syer is the third iteration in this exploration.

"Syer is alive, just like us. No one can predict what it will do next," Yu says. "How its face will look, its moods, its undertones when speaking … will all correspond to the way the person talking to it acts. … It is self-evolving."

Pei Muyan, who currently studies at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, says that digital art allows people to cross culture and language barriers. Her entry, The Letter of the Ocean, shows the typing of a letter about the countries and regions she has visited, recorded not in any of the languages of the world, but using footage of the sea.

"It seems that the sea isolates continents and islands, but I would rather see the ocean as connecting people from different cultures and allowing us to reach one another. Everyone can get a message from this letter of the sea, and I believe humanity has shared feelings, despite our differences."

She says that this is the case with digital art, which helps people share their experience, knowledge and emotions more easily, and opens up discussions, in different social and cultural contexts, of new possibilities for the world.

Contact the writer at linqi@chinadaily.com.cn