Member Spotlight: Gordon Fung, 2024 Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Awardee

Who are you? Where are you currently located?
I am Gordon Fung from San Francisco and currently based in Chicago.

What brought you there?

I intended to work with glitch arts, video arts, custom-built electronics, and so the School of Art Institute of Chicago would be a great choice. I first thought of organizing a noise music festival across the Great Lakes region, but then new directions came up.

I curated “transience” in October 2022 at school, a two-evening extravaganza featuring 40 artists (20 performers and 24 screening works). I realized there are so many great time-based media artists around, and I believe they deserve to be seen and heard by more people in a wider context. From that point on, I focus on curations for experimental theater, screening, and exhibitions for media works.

I have curated 15+ large-scale shows to showcase 150+ artists since I arrived in Chicago in October 2022. Besides curations, I work with experimental audiovisual performances, new media installations, noise music, experimental film/video, media archaeology, participatory works, and happenings.

Inspired by the unique Chicago video/media arts lineage and collectivity in Fluxus, I form and direct the experimental time-based arts collective //sense to showcase largescale experimental community theater performances, exhibitions, and screenings. Counteracting the marginalization of experimental time-based arts, I curate and foster a collaborative common ground for sound, video, performance, and media artists to create gesamtkunstwerk through synergy. By democratizing media tools, I empower and mobilize the community to rectify media injustice imposed by corporations.

What does “New Media” mean to you?

Unlike traditional media that sits on 2D, and at best a 3D surface, new media is usually time-based, which expands into the time-space continuum to create a transformative and transcendental experience. New Media can expand our consciousness and unconsciousness, elevating our understanding of such to the next level. I always consider relevancy in my work. Why does this work matter? What is it adding
or contributing to a newer understanding of our life about technologies? I am a runaway composer, and I found composition, not a suitable medium to tackle or solve social issues. So to speak, composition, to me, barely has any relevancy to our lives and concerns.

New Media has an inherent relevance to our lives, they are everywhere. They are driving our lives in all aspects, from finding restaurants on Google Maps to video chatting with someone who shares a 16-hour timezone difference. However large corporations have been spoon-feeding consumers to overlook the potency of media tools for creative purposes.

Consumers are fed into an illusion of having power and control over their media tools, but this is entirely not true. My goal as an artist-curator is to encourage them to rethink the power dynamics between consumers and corporations, and how media arts can help regain control and agency at users’ ends.

New Media is always old and new at the same time. With planned obsolescence, many new media tools had already fallen into obsolescence. My work unearths these hidden potentials in media tools to create new dialogues between Men and Machines. Through this conversation, I encourage viewers and audiences to rethink what technology brings to us, in both positive and negative aspects.

What brought you to the New Media Caucus?

I got to know about NMC when I am looking for events, conferences, and calls in New
Media.

What does receiving the 2024 Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award mean to you?

In the curatorial and administrative fields, institutions barely consider including a curator who pursues an MFA in studio arts. Whilst it is understandable to favor more history/administration-focused majors, this phenomenon does deter many artist-curators from pursuing curatorial practices.

The NMC award affirms my position as a practicing artist-curator’s significance in media arts. We are practitioners who have hands-on and first-hand experience with media and technologies. Media prevails in our daily lives but lacks an equal amount of attention and representation as the traditional media.
Among institutions, curations are still biased toward showing traditional media. We need more curations for new media. In particular, curations that explore and discuss both the pros and cons of media and technology.

I am not a big fan, if not an opposer of “Art for art’s sake.” Arts have to be relevant to our lives, our narrative, our history, and our collective un/consciousness. Art cannot come from nowhere, it always comes from somewhere. Artist has to find that relevancy to our collective lives and create a narrative that bridges people, culture, society, and history. I view arts as media that bridge people back together through realizing the interconnectedness to rebuild trust in humanities. Media arts, in particular, is
significantly more powerful than traditional media in this regard.

The NMC award also affirms my direction to cultivate, empower, and bridge communities through media and technologies. In a society that is far from recovered from collective trauma, I view media arts as a significant beacon to light up new paths to healing.

What current projects would you like to share with us?

My recent curation at the International Museum of Surgical Science on 4/12 showcased 35 media and performance artists. My experimental theater draws heavy influence and inspiration from Fluxus. I have curated similar theater at Comfort Station and No Nation Art Lab in Chicago. This model of experimental theater challenges established structure, power, and aesthetics through absurdity and spontaneity.

When mixing media tools with happenings and performance arts, I can greatly expand the notion of time, space, and bodies. Besides, the participatory elements in my curation of experimental community theater aim to empower community members to rethink what arts can be, what arts mean, and how they actually can make art with simple actions, tools, and gestures.

I am curating for Ars Electronica 2024 Campus Exhibition in September, showcasing 5 artists’ works in the Department of Art & Technology / Sound Practice at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. I am also planning to celebrate the 50th year mark of the invention of Sandin Image Professor, an analog video synthesizer invented by Dan Sandin. There will be a series of exhibitions, screenings, and performances.

I am also setting up a gallery space called neomediapolis in MANA Contemporary Chicago to showcase video, media, and performance arts. The inaugural show, the tentative title “from the vast wasteland there blossoms a TV garden,” hopefully will be on view from September to October 2024. It will feature new video sculptures through open calls using the donated/discarded CRT TVs that I have collected around the Great Lakes region.

Since I have recently graduated, I am planning to partake in a year-long project to produce a video series that utilizes generative analog techniques to explore the relationship between mysticism, esotericism, and media.

I am also joining the Chicago Artist Coalition’s Curatorial Residency 2024–26, I am excited to work with artists there and hope to bring more insights from the media arts aspect to expand the narrative to connect the communities better.

Where can people see your work, physically and digitally?

Digitally available on my website: https://gordondfung.wordpress.com/ and Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/gordon.d.fung/.