Zhang Ga: The Peoples’ Portrait: A Globally Networked Public Art Project
November 2004
Zhang Ga: The Peoples’ Portrait: A Globally Networked Public Art Project
Zhang Ga’s The Peoples’ Portrait: A Globally Networked Public Art Project is a participatory, networked, public art project that creates a global portrait of people, rendered in real time and displayed instantly and simultaneously on large video walls around the world and online. The 2004 version was shown on both the artport Gate Page and the website of the MECAD Media Center for Art and Design in Barcelona. Kiosks equipped with cameras set up by the artist allowed passersby to take snapshots that were instantly transmitted to a central server. The portraits were then displayed in real time on video walls at Reuters’s Times Square Headquarters, New York; the Museum of the Future at Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria; DEAF04 (Dutch Electronic Art Festival 2004), Rotterdam, Netherlands; SENI Fest in Singapore; and MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific) and Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. The images were shown first in chronological order then randomly from the expanding online archive. By using network and communication infrastructures as image-making tools, Zhang Ga collapses time and space and challenges traditional understanding of portraiture and authorship in the digital age.
More information about The Peoples' Portrait is available on thing.net.
Zhang Ga (b. 1963; Hangzhou, China) is an artist, curator, writer, and educator working at the intersection of culture and technology. Formerly the director of the New York–based Netart Initiative, Zhang Ga has exhibited and lectured on media art worldwide and has published in October, Flash Art International, and with the MIT Press. He is the founding artistic director of Chronus Art Center, Shanghai and the former consulting curator of media art at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, where he curated three editions of its international media art triennial. Other curatorial work includes ZHANG Peili (Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, 2024–25), Topologies of the Real (Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, China, 2023), and Motion Is Action: 35 Years of Chinese Media Art (By Art Matters Museum, Hangzhou, China, 2023). Zhang Ga is distinguished professor and vice dean at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.
