The **ALIEN Art Centre — Video Sandbox Program** marks the fourth edition of the museum’s annual open call for multimedia art. It is open to contemporary artists aged 40 and under from across Taiwan and takes place in **Memory**, the exhibition space on the first floor of ALIEN Art Centre.
The space once served as a telegraph room where military personnel exchanged messages with their families before departing for the front lines, becoming a site of both farewell and reunion. Today, it has been transformed into a contemporary vessel for memory and moving images, offering emerging artists a place for experimentation and expression. Since its opening, ALIEN Art Centre has remained committed to supporting emerging moving-image artists in southern Taiwan. Through curatorial support, access to exhibition spaces, and public open calls, the museum has gradually cultivated a diverse and dynamic platform for contemporary moving-image practices.
The **Video Sandbox** program was jointly initiated by **Yaman Shao**, Director of ALIEN Art Centre, and LO He-Lin, Associate Professor at the Graduate Institute of Animation and Film Art, Tainan National University of the Arts. The title draws on the concept of a sandbox as a building unit within a virtual environment, symbolizing a creative field that can be continuously constructed, tested, and reset within an exhibition space resembling a form of memory storage.
Through this program, the museum seeks to discover artists with strong potential and integrate academic and practical resources to establish a public platform grounded in exhibition-making and driven by artistic practice. This year, the program further expands its collaboration with the Graduate Institute of Interdisciplinary Art at the College of Arts, National Kaohsiung Normal University, strengthening cross-institutional connections and creating new spaces for dialogue within southern Taiwan’s art network. Through these efforts, ALIEN Art Centre aims to become an important hub for moving-image creation and the development of emerging artists.
The theme of the **2026 open call, Net Zero as a Creative Method**, welcomes artists working with moving-image-based practices, including multimedia installation, experimental video, interactive technology, and generative art.
As **Net Zero** becomes a central term within global policy, the technology industry, and systems of capital, the program invites artists to reconsider how moving images are produced. From high-resolution imagery and real-time computation to AI generation and large-scale immersive projection, contemporary visual technologies continue to pursue increasingly immediate and realistic sensory experiences. Yet the data centres, server-cooling systems, and energy consumption behind these technologies have long remained hidden beneath the illusion that digital images are weightless.
**Net Zero as a Creative Method** does not ask artists to reduce energy consumption through a moralistic framework. Instead, it encourages a reconsideration of how images are generated, presented, and perceived. As a medium highly dependent on electricity, equipment, and computation, moving-image art may appear incompatible with sustainability. At the same time, it is uniquely capable of revealing the material conditions and ecological costs underlying the digital world.
We invite artists to explore the tensions among imaging technologies, materiality, sensory experience, and ecological politics. Sustainability should not function merely as the subject of an artwork, but become part of its form and creative methodology, generating new responses and questions concerning the future of moving-image culture.
【2025 Video Sandbox – Open Call for Video Art】
