Eastern Fantasy: A Metaverse Sci-Fi Fest

On 2022 June 2nd, Han Song, a well-known Chinese Sci-Fi writer, posted an entry titled The First Metaverse Sci-Fi Fest on Earth on Weibo.

As the epidemic put offline activities on hold, how should art, technology, science fiction, literature, music and other fields cope with new changes? With fiction and reality deeply intertwined, what should be the ultimate destination for creators? The convention Han Song mentioned is the “Eastern Fantasy: A Metaverse Sci-Fi Fest” held by a group of artists, writers and musicians. Led by Lucia Luo (Yinguang), Dean of Penglai SF Acadamy and Tongzhou Yu, deputy director of the School of Innovation and Design, China Academy of Art, and jointly initiated by Yang Ping, together with Wang Zhe and Xu Jun of Meitu (China) Limited, it marks the first attempt of its kind ever in terms of planning, design and engineering construction.

The fest is divided into three parts: art exhibition, music performance and crossover forums, all of which are held in the realm of Metaverse for the first time in China, creating a new way of integration and building a cross-domain platform. MANA, the core network platform in the domestic art field, live streamed the convention, whose exhibits were on the hot list. The Chinese sci-fi community was also very supportive. Everyone shared information with each other and actively participated in it, generating a heat wave. Statistics by Weibo show number of people interested in the event reaching a million.

William Gibson once famously put: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” This convention is a proof of the first half of this statement and the answer to the second.

“ Art Utopia ”

People have long been simulating real-life scenarios in the metaverse. Here, our curators went out of the norm. Lucia divided the exhibition area into ocean, land, sky ans consciousness based on Gaston Bachelard's "Element Poetics".

In the exhibition with the theme of “Art Utopia” from Lucia, visitors transform themselves into contemporary digital bards and travel through classical times into imaginary futures. The visitors pinch their unique digital figures to collect exhibits and clues in the meta-universe to understand the world of Eastern fantasy. The exhibits created by writers and artists all over China. Among the works, a CG film titled Ghost in the Sea is extra-eye-catching.

“ Super - Surface ”

Yu Tongzhou continued the "super-surface" concept of the legendary architectural group "Super Studio" , measured the world with an ever-expanding grid, recreated it, proposed "An alternative model for life on Earth" of a flat world, cyberspace,and explored the concepts of space and normative standards with metaverse characteristics, basing on the principles of graphic design aesthetics, with the keywords of “planetary level”, “giant”, “negative space”, “wormhole”, “suspension”, “antigravity”, etc.

Yang Ping advanced a new concept that real landscape and conscious space exist as a form of "yin and yang fishes" in contraposition, reflecting a mutual transformation between consciousness and reality, so as to expand the connotation of Eastern Fantasy aesthetics.

“ Distributed Narrative ”

An element of the popular board game “Murder Mystery”, together with the concept of “Automatic Drama”, was introduced into the event to connect all exhibits displayed, where visitors can observe the exhibits and gather clues to dig out the truth. The “scripted murder mystery” part was completed by a student team of “Penglai Workshop” led by Yin Guang (Lucia) , both teachers at Penglai SF Acadamy.

In addition to that, a metaverse music performance was also held during the convention, where sound was extracted from both science fiction and real-life technology and transformed into musical works and live audio & visual performances.Since “metaverse” became a buzzword, there has never been such a crossover of metaverse with art exhibitions, Murder Mystery and live music performances, which is of great historical significance.

In the online digital world firstly built for the Chinese sci-fi community, an online group photo “Phantom of Taixu” was taken at the booth “Trisolaran droplets” designed for Liu Cixin

The term metaverse was coined in science fiction, which in turn laid the ground for this Sci-Fi convention. That’s perhaps why the Chinese science fiction community showed great enthusiasm, with almost all the top writers, scholars and publishers present. Wang Jinkang, a well-known science fiction writer delivered a speech, encouraging young students to pay attention to the Chinese romanticism rooted in science fiction.

Liu Cixin, Han Song and Chen Qiufan, all famous science fiction writers, have all authorized their most representative and influential speeches, which then were designed by artists as special exhibits of "energy body" . The video of Liu Cixin was transformed into multi-dimensional "water droplets" in space. Science Fiction World Magazine, Eight Light Minutes Culture, Future Affairs Administration, Tadpole Stave and other major sci-fi institutions recommended works as exhibits.Xingyun Awards for Global Chinese Science Fiction authorized trial readings of winning works.

Authorized speech by Liu Cixin

Here is the most famous Chinese science fiction author: Liu Cixin. He authorized us to display one of his influential speeches——the speech at Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, expressing his cogitative and poetic ideas on science fiction.

Artist Zhou Jiangyi extracted the well-known saying “Future is like pouring rain. It reaches us even before we have time to open the umbrella”, combining with the famous image of “Trisolaran droplets” in The Three Body Problem as the elements of creation, based on the imagination of “rainning in the universe”, completed an abnormal booth and placed it at the entrance.

"Future Narrative and Narrative Future" cross-border forum

Hosted by Lucia Luo and Tongzhou Yu. Guests from different fields including literature, art, drama, music, etc. participated the webcast from their homes and offices in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, France and other regions. Interchange of ides was live-streamed worldwide.

Wu Yan, deputy director of the Science Fiction Literature Committee of the Chinese Writers Association and professor of the Southern University of Science and Technology, congratulated the convention by video and shared his experience of participating in the Chinese and US Metaverse Conference. Xie Chenghong, vice president of Taishan College of Science and Technology, delivered a speech, looking forward to building a platform for mutual thinking through this convention and making contributions to Chinese sci-fic and sci-fic education.

Agnes Lam, associate professor of the University of Macau, analyzed the Murder Mystery from the perspective of Communication studies, and proposed learning from traditional drama to combine education with games; French immersive drama director Samuel Lepoil explained the concept of “auto-performance”, building stories and performances on different narratives from multiple perspectives; William Wang, a well-known writer and associate professor of Sun Yat-Sen University, discussed the three relationships of future poetics; Ma Haiping, one of the most influential electronic musicians in China, argued that the long-term spiritual crisis existing in the youth group provided the inspiration for music create a utopia; Yang Ping, chief science fiction writer of Penglai SF Acadamy, analyzed several challenges facing the posthuman era, speculating changes on cognition, identity, privacy, management and other aspects and believed that future individuals would experience multiple resocialization processes in their lives; Wang Zhe, director of the Institute of Aesthetics of MeituPic Company, proposed that the virtual image of human beings would continue to break through the limitations of the image of “human” in the future.