Director Biography – Shu CAO
Cao Shu’s teaching at China Academy of Art, his practice includes but is not limited to new media art, 3D digital moving image, sound installation, and interactive games. His works are often based on a specific place and space and ask open-ended questions. He hopes to reactivate historical events or personal memory at the perceptual level through experiments with different materials and media. In recent years, Cao Shu has been residency artist at Atelier Mondial in Basel(2017), Yokohama Koganecho Bazzaar Art Festival (2019),Goethe Institutes(2020). His works have won such awards as 2022 OCAT x KADIST Emerging Media Artist Award, 2021 Exposure Award of PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai,2015 New Narrative Award from the Long Week of Short Films,and 2017 BISFF Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement. His works has been exhibited in art Museums around the world, such as Kunsthausbaselland, By Art Matters, UCCA Dune, Macao Art Museum, Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, OCAT Shanghai and Shenzhen, Sleep Center New York,X Museum Beijing, Die Sammlung Falckenberg Hall Hamburg. Works are collected by Kadist Art Foundation, Australian White Rabbit Art Gellary, Blue Mountain Contemporary Art Foundation, Zhejiang Art Museum,etc.
Synopsis
Since ancient times, humans have been obsessed with predicting the future, and artificial intelligence spawned by ant colony algorithms has made Laplace‘s demon-like precise predictions possible. In the future, vertical farming will be able to bring the growth of all crops under algorithmic control, predicting every second of a plant‘s respiration. The story describes an artificial intelligence drone caring for the growth of sugarcane, its duty is to eliminate all accidental factors and nurture plant growth, even though humans have long been extinct. At this moment, the appearance of an ant suddenly reminds the drone of its first patrol, in an era after the collapse of collectivism in the 20th century, a sugar mill destroyed by globalized precise predictive behavior.