For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

Walter Benjamin
The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov
1936

To Your Eternity, the fourth installment of the Today Art Museum’s art and technology themed biennial, zooms ever slightly away from an obsession with the now and the next, but revels in unlikely, luminous juxtapositions across geography and time: Isamu Noguchi’s 1947 monument for a world after humans with Siah Armajani’s 1969 attempt to build mathematically viable towers towards the limits of the earth’s gravitational pull; retro-style video games exploring China’s first wave of entrepreneurship with extreme speculations of a “thousand-year plan”; a space artist in search of fallen satellites with a photographer chasing hurricanes in the eye of the storm; virtual simulations that transport visitors to the wetlands of the Rhone delta as well as the caves of Alaskan glaciers;the aesthetic possibilities of merging bodies and machines with cross-species reproductive technology; the beguiling world of jinns that transcend space with new sci-fi stories about languages that drastically warp time; “Asian Futures without Asians” in Hollywood’s entertainment industrial complex; stately portraits of Huawei’ figurehead with a migrant worker’s durational, maximalist record-making of precarious labor.

The exhibition takes its title and spirit from the 2021 anime series To Your Eternity. Created by Yoshitoki Ōima, the story follows an amorphous alien entity as it approximates various forms of inorganic, plant, animal, and ultimately human lives through inhabiting their life cycles. This trans-species metamorphosis is spurred by the death of the previous host, expanding the definition of “intelligence” to also encompass feelings, embodied experiences, and situated knowledge against a grander scale of time. The exhibition similarly hopes to immerse visitors in an exhilarating range of artistic and philosophical perspectives on what technology means for our imagination, heart, and livelihood beyond media novelty, spectacle, or gadgetry. As an art and technology biennial, To Your Eternity features an unusual range of media, encompassing VR experiences, AI and algorithm-based art, games, video, lecture performance, sculpture, drawing, wallpaper, photography, tapestry, lacquer, mural, and monument. By inserting crucial art historical examples from the mid-20th century into the mix of more recent work, the exhibition invites ponderings on longer throughlines in historical conditionings of our current technological and existential crisis that never truly went away.

(Text written by Xin Wang)

The fourth edition of the Future of Today Biennial is curated by Xin Wang.

To Your Eternity, the 4th Future of Today Biennial