TEMPLE is a continuation of the themes Pham explored in Electric dirge, 2021, a digital work originally commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney, as part of its Digital Curatorship program. In the hyperreal world of Electric dirge, thousands of whirring computer fans reverberate in unison, underscoring a fantastical yet unsettling neon scene that combines the visual language of technology, classical Asian architecture and religious iconography.
In TEMPLE, a major new commission by the NGV, Pham yanks this digital landscape out of the screen and into the physical realm, blurring the boundary between the two. Inside the NGV, visitors enter the work through one of four archways into a large-scale, responsive inferno of computer fans surrounding a central Bagua – the set of eight symbols used in Taoist cosmology epitomising the fundamental principles of reality. With its ancient binary language, the Bagua draws clear parallels with the language of modern computing. In TEMPLE, the Bagua symbolises an historic ‘computer’ depicting and translating the physical world, here in conversation with the virtual realities of contemporary technology. The experience of TEMPLE is a visceral sense of the connection between the digital and ‘IRL’ and a heightened sense of the way the virtual is rooted in large-scale, tangible and often landscape-defining hardware.
https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/melbourne-now/artists/rel-pham/
