Hsin-Chien Huang

Professor Hsin-Chien Huang is an internationally acclaimed new media artist whose practice investigates the convergence of art, technology, and immersive storytelling. Active since 1995, his work spans interdisciplinary installations, performance, mechanical systems, and algorithmic media, integrating literature, design, and emerging technologies into experiential forms. His projects have been presented in over 50 countries at major international platforms, including the Venice Biennale and MoMA. Huang’s cross-disciplinary approach bridges art, research, and digital media, extending into collaborations with artists such as Laurie Anderson and Jean-Michel Jarre. His practice moves fluidly across artistic and technological domains, shaping new forms of perception and narrative through immersive environments.

His works have received major international recognition, including honours from the Venice Film Festival, Cannes XR, and Ars Electronica. In parallel with his artistic practice, Huang is a professor at National Taiwan Normal University, and an active curator and collaborator with Ars Electronica, contributing to global dialogues on new media art and fostering international exchange.

FILM

Ekholux – The Virtual Sanctuary (Screening) 
Set in a post-collapse future shaped by the failure of AI-driven systems, Ekholux unfolds within a fractured virtual world where memory, language, and reality have begun to disintegrate. What remains are unstable architectures and residual traces of human culture, scattered across a shifting digital landscape.

The experience combines escape-room puzzles with extreme spatial movement. Players begin inside sealed chambers, solving physics-based challenges through timing, trajectory, and perception. Upon release, they enter vast megastructures, launching into high-speed traversal—gliding, falling, and racing across suspended environments.

Within this world, cultural memory no longer exists as stable knowledge, but as fragments embedded in space—architectural motifs, rhythmic patterns, and sensory cues. These elements only emerge through interaction. Each movement activates, sustains, or reshapes what remains.

Ekholux proposes a living archive against cultural entropy. Rather than preserving culture as static data, it requires continuous participation: memory survives only when enacted. In this collapsing post-AI world, players do not simply explore ruins—they become agents who momentarily restore coherence, allowing fragile traces of human culture to persist through embodied experience.

TRAILER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3vOPieoArk

TALK
Playable Archives: From User-Generated Content to User-Generated Culture
Set in a post-collapse future where AI-driven systems have failed, Ekholux invites players to navigate a fractured virtual world in which cultural memory no longer exists as stable knowledge, but as fragments embedded in space — only recoverable through interaction and movement. The talk explores how the work proposes a new model of living archive: one where culture survives not through preservation, but through continuous participation and embodied experience.

WEBSITE
https://hsinchienhuang.com/