It's art, for the Facebook generation

By Miral Fahmy

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - If like many people in our technology-ruled world you can't live without Google, video games, digital media and social networking sites like Facebook, this is your kind of art exhibit.

For just over a week from Friday, the "International Symposium on Electronic Art 2008", a leading global media arts event, will showcase 16 artworks that transform the technology we all use on a daily basis into exhibits created to get you thinking about the state of the world we live in.

"Technology does not work in a cultural vacuum," ISEA2008 artistic director Gunalan Nadarajan told Reuters. "Culture very often is the basis of technological development but that is a relationship that is not sufficiently marked."

The exhibits, on display at the National Museum of Singapore, were selected by an international jury from an open call for submissions in 2007.

Media artists were required to submit proposals for works they wished to develop and that took their inspiration from ISEA08's five themes: whether technology renders our physical location unimportant; how technology affects our perception of reality; crowd sourcing or the "wiki" phenomenon; "fun" science and whether technology has made our world borderless.

The chosen artists then spent several months in Singapore, working with local technology labs, in an experiment the curators hoped would push the boundaries of both art and science.

As expected, most of the exhibits are interactive.

"Civilization V" by Serbia's Eastwood-Real Time Strategy Group is a modification of empire-building video game series "Civilization", which highlights the battle for dominance between user-driven websites, and where instead of pillaging, visitors use tactics like "emotional blackmail" and "love bombing".