Microwave International New Media Arts Festival (Chinese: 微波國際新媒體藝術節) is a new media art festival based in Hong Kong. It began in 1996 as the annual video art festival for local video art collective Videotage.
In 2006, it became independent from Videotage and in 2007 it officially became fully independent as the government's previous "presenter" role was handed over to Microwave.[1] The government remains the main sponsor of the Festival, although many more sponsors are sought for each year's Festival.
The annual festival generally includes a main exhibition at the Hong Kong City Hall, a smaller scale and usually more alternative exhibition in a separate venue, a keynote conference, performances, screening programmes and other special events organised each year.
In 2007, the performance by US art collective Graffiti Research Lab that "hacked the city" with their L.A.S.E.R.T.A.G along with the participation of local graffiti artist MC Yan, they achieved a record-breaking tag[2] 1,200 metres across Victoria Harbour (James Powderly and MC Yan tagging from Central ferry, with Evan Roth and the local crew controlling the set up in front of the Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui).
In its first extended event outside of the annual November Festival, Microwave also held the "A-Glow-Glow" Macro Interactive Media Art Exhibition in April 2008, which was funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and aimed for more mass appeal. Two large-scale interactive LED artworks were placed by the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront, right across the harbour from the Hong Kong City Hall, where the annual festival main exhibition is held.
Microwave's festival design, by local design partner Milkxhake, also consistently wins design awards almost every year since their partnership commenced.
Microwave International New Media Arts Festival began as an annual video art festival for the Hong Kong-based non-profit organisation Videotage in 1996. As new technologies became more accessible and were used in new forms of art production, the festival expanded to include a wider range of new media art. It was the first art festival in Hong Kong dedicated to the development and presentation of new media art, and has since steadily grown into a well-established festival that combine exhibitions of new media art with keynote conferences, video screenings and other programmes to nurture emerging media artists and develop the media arts community in Hong Kong.
Microwave Festival '97 was directed by the artist, curator and researcher Ellen Pau, and invited artists from Germany, the USA, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia, and Denmark. The festival was held at the Exhibition Hall at Hong Kong City Hall. It included screenings of 4 video artworks ('Signal-techno', 'Culture interface', 'Loco-motion', 'Superman and Wonderwoman'), a 'Being Digital' CD-Rom Exhibition, a conference, seminar, and workshop.[3] This edition of the festival explored the possibilities of the CD-ROM as a medium for storage and distribution and elucidated strategies employed by artists to re-think the "interface" as an intimate space between screens and their users.
Nature Transformer (自然反)[4]
Transient Creatures (異生界)[5]
"A-Glow-Glow" Macro Interactive Media Art Exhibition
"A-Glow-Glow"[6] was held by the waterfront in Tsim Sha Tsui (Kowloon Peninsula), with two interactive LED installations by two artist groups:
Luminous Echo (形光譜)[9]