SPEED SHOW: TRACES

Thursday 14th of October 2010, 19:00 – 23:00

Extremis Internet Cafe, Academiei Street 9, Bucharest, Romania (G-maps)

Digital memories are embedded into the core of our on-line journeys, in the way we surf, communicate and interact on /with the internet. Most of the times we decide not to follow back our traces, we just keep on clicking, searching for the new and fresher stuff that’s out there, trying to link it all to our present state. Constantly refreshing, searching untrodden, exotic places made available by the new translate system or checking new on-line image boards, the recollection of older sites or themes that you used to like seems unnecessary. But that is already the constructed self of being on-line. So the deeper you advance into the NOW, the deeper your roots and traces go. Recall past promises of “the digital age”, recall long lost diaries you used to look for in that empty search bar, recall lost passwords of the accounts you used to have. Some of these entities still live out there as forgotten pieces of digital dust, piling up in a properly acclimatized server room. For the Bucharest Speed Show we’ve selected 19 net.art projects that address these specific issues: the lost memories, the emptiness and the ghostly snail trail of our digital presence. The wide selection includes works that deal with web surfing as an artistic tool as well as youtube/ games/ SecondLife interventions, code manipulation and animated gifs.

Curated by Silvia Saitoc & Matei Sâmihăian, October 2010

Participating artists:

Jeff Baij (US)

Petra Cortright (US)

Chris Coy (US)

Harm Van Den Dorpel (NL)

Jacob Broms Engblom (SE)

Parker Ito (US)

sumoto.iki  (FR)

JODI (NL/BE)

Oliver Laric (AT)

Jan Robert Leegte (NL)

Miltos Manetas (GR)

Călin Man (RO)

Michael Manning (US)

Jon Rafman (US)

Ryder Ripps (US)

Tabor Robak (US)

Rafael Rozendaal (NL)

Lance Wakeling (US)


SPEED SHOW: statement

The Internet browser a key element to the success of the web in the beginning of the 90′s has grown mature in the last two decades. Technical development, open standards and open software made the browser a very powerful tool. It seems soon it will take over the operating system and there will be nothing left than apps in the cloud.

It’s about time to revisit net.art in an era of 500 million Facebook users. net.art never really found it’s way out of the media art bubble. The browser was the promising canvas in the early ’90s and is today more then ever capable to do what ever you like. Within the last let’s say 5 years the Internet arrived and entered the mainstream. The social web unfolded its power and became part of everyday life of hundreds of millions users. Their massive real time information flow began to have a huge impact on mainstream media and political structures.

The potential size of an audience for on-line art work has grown infinitely large. Technical barriers, limited access, little bandwidth or lack of skills are not an issue any more. In an era of Internet memes and 20+ million Youtube views on one video in a day artists need to reconsider the web from a different perspective. A new generation of creative minds picked up the field of net.art and expanded it to the next stage: pop.net.art (coined by Aram Bartholl 2010) emerged under the influence of social web monopolies, highly flexible open software, amateur meme cult and pop culture. A wide range of coders, designers and artists including the pop.net.art experts from F.A.T. Lab are experimenting this genre with great success. ‘Classic’ net.art is appropriated and gets remixed with web activism, DIY philosophy, sharing culture, easy to use browser ad-dons and open source believers on a state of the art technical level.

net.art never died! It just moved to your local Internet-shop! Come and join the party!


Aram Bartholl 2010

—–> check out the previous Speed Shows in Viena, Berlin & Amsterdam link

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