(LX 2.0 curatorial statement)
The recurrently described and quoted idea of contemporary experience’s growing technological mediation (and to some extent, determination) is no longer an unpredictable surprise. Instead, and similarly to the technologies behind its origin, this idea has been completely assimilated into our daily existence. Presently, digital technologies have become so ubiquitous and polymorphous that anyone in any part of the globe is placed in the centre of social and informational networks controlled simply by the move of a finger.
Given digital technologies’ central role in contemporary societies, their use as an artistic tool and, most importantly, as a medium of its own, comes with little or no surprise. Historically, artists have always been pioneers in using new resources and technological advances. One of the most recent examples, and by now perfectly assimilated and legitimized by institutional discourse, video, became an artistic discipline in the late 60’s of the 20th century, right after the commercial launch of Portapak, the first portable video camera.
The artistic experiments with digital technologies are contemporary to the use of video in visual arts. In 1968, at the ICA in London, the show Cybernetic Serendipity opened, trying to account for the use of cybernetics in contemporary art. Even though having appeared at a chronological moment very close to that of video, only some decades later, in the middle of the 90’s, with the generalized use and exponential growth of processing capabilities of the personal computer, and the commercial debut of the internet, a new artistic practice, characterized by extreme transdisciplinarity, processual immateriality and the assumption of interactivity as a distinctive feature, did develop.
If the hybrid and polymorphous aspects of what is now called new media art (and daring to ask, by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, what is there new about new media art) caused the resurfacing of the debate around the concepts of the work of art and of intellectual authority/ownership, its most radical discipline, net art, started questioning, thanks to its immateriality, ubiquity and free access imperatives, the modernist ideology of the white cube as the priveligied way of showing contemporary art, and also that of the museum as the legitimating instance for the contemporary artistic discourse.
Similarly to its more experienced relative, video, new media, and net art more specifically, had to deal in a first moment with the lack of acknowledgment as a legitimate artistic practice. But if video art, after being welcomed into the heart of the museum, created room for black boxes to appear inside the white cubes, net art, due to its specificities, required a different approach. What’s the point of showing inside a museum something that only exists online and that can be accessed from home or from the office, with a simple computer connected to the internet? This question is recurring when thinking about the most adequate way of showing online projects, and led to the first experiments in the online museology of net art, through the development of online platforms and where commissioned works were displayed and archived, becoming accessible everywhere at every time.
LX 2.0 presents itself as one of such projects. Even though a being a traditional concept in the new media art field, it is a unique exercise in the Portuguese artistic landscape. It will comission, display and archive online projects created by artists who have been developing a relevant work in exploring the Internet as an artistic medium. Besides comissioning new work, LX 2.0 will also, gradually, create a database of links to different resources, like artists, exhibitions, platfoms, publications and readings, in order to contextualize and allow for a theoretical background for these works and their underlying discourse.
(Neurozappingfolks curatorial statement)
NeuroZappingFolks is a digital piece for the Internet. The lack of interactivity of the work presents itself as a neurosis of the application itself, simulating a frantic navigation through the web, in search of something unknown. The nucleus is constituted by an algorythm gathering information from the popular website del.icio.us, where thousands of users keep (for themselves, but in a public way) urls from other pages in the Internet, associating them with specific tags, short words functioning as labels and giving the link they refer to some minimum amount of information. The same words (art, sex, Internet, anime…) are usually referred by different people, allowing for unexpected inter-relations between several sites.
NeuroZappingFolks is then a non-linear zapping through the web, a path leading to the inside of a web of relations, a web that can be explored from one tag to a site, to another tag, to another site... from word to image to word to image. NeuroZappingFolks is then the simulation of a brain lost in the web (lost between servers, but also lost in Internet's double identity: word and image).
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