The Shanghai Project is a multidisciplinary ideas platform bringing together practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including art, architecture, design, film, performance, sound, as well as the humanities, social and natural sciences.
The inaugural edition of the Shanghai Project will launch on September 4, 2016, and take place over the duration of eleven months, ending in July 2017.
[3] Taking "Envision 2116" as its theme, the festival gathering—from China and abroad—"artists, filmmakers, performers, musicians, designers, architects, writers (including journalists, bloggers, science fiction novelists, and poets), philosophers, historians, scientists, economists, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, doctors, lawyers, engineers, hackers, and activists, all of whom will be dubbed 'researchers'",[4] and the people of Shanghai to think, discuss, relate, and act on the sustainability of the humankind's futures in the 22nd century".
[5] Researchers of this phase included: Xu Bing,[6] Jenova Chen, Otobong Nkanga, Douglas Coupland, Liam Gillick, Liu Yi, Sou Fujimoto, and Cildo Meireles, etc.
"Qidian," which loosely translates into "starting point", is an nationwide open call designed to tap into the talent and interests of China's new generation, which is based on the long-term international project "89plus" (co-curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist in collaboration with Katherine Dionysius).