Taipei Travel

Before the digital age, French philosopher Jacques Derrida used “Archive Fever” (Mal d’archive) to describe the human drive toward oblivion. He argued that human beings have a strong desire for collecting, preserving, and archiving information and memory. The term “fever,” in this case, suggests a somewhat compulsive and anxious archiving behavior resulting from the fear of forgetting, the longing for connecting with memory, and the struggle between the two—this struggle involves an intricate relationship between interwoven desires, anxieties, power, and technology. However, in unforeseeable ways, the struggle and plundering between oblivion and memory continue to exist through information and data technologies, such as social media, cloud databases, big data, and algorithms. According to the statistics provided by data service companies, including Statista, Hootsuite, and Findstack, nearly 400 million images are uploaded daily to Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms. The ever-growing data-driven technologies have repeatedly and strongly demonstrated that the image era has now reached an unprecedented fervent state.

The question of “What is real?” seems irrelevant today. Instead, we should focus on what has been produced by the information deluge that makes it almost impossible to distinguish truth from lies. Modern technology has gradually transformed human beings into technology-driven visual machines. Images have replaced human memories and become ubiquitous in every aspect of everyday life, permeating the interstices of reality. Art historian Johnathan Crary critiques the notion of progress associated with images, questioning their ability to offer satisfaction. He believes that images have not merely destroyed information barriers, controlled our sleep hours and our time to wake up, and invaded the publicness of space and our privacy, but havealso reduced people’s concentration, leading to an inability to concentrate and think. The asymmetrical relationship between image and people exists like a spectre. [1] Instead of remembering things naturally, people have come to increasingly rely on using images and algorithms to document and manage every detail in life. Thus, we are seeing information overload and excessive archiving on mobile devices and social media; we are also witnessing memes being used for sarcasm and black humor, reflecting trending social phenomena and political events. Additionally, the consumption of internet information as something that is time-sensitive has not only made images a mainstream mode of communication but has also introduced the possibility of bridging the gap between perception and reality. In today’s world, with memory losing its grasp, the dream bird of human beings remains unrealized.[2]

Image Fever is developed based on the idea of using the internet as a framework for comprehending image, video, and film works. This exhibition features nine artists, including Daniel Canogar, Wu I-Yeh, Wu Tzu-An, Li Yi-Fan, Lee Yung-Chih, Musquiqui Chihying, Matthew Griffin, Chuang Pei-Xin, and Hsu Zhe-Hao. Their works respectively explore the meaning of image conversion between information and images, material and virtuality, fiction and reality in relation to various topics, including individual and collective memory, identity, internet culture, geopolitics, and digital capitalism. It aims to reveal how modern technology shapes human desires and the alienation of human perception resulting from the technologies of image governance.