Opening next Thursday in New York is a show titled Notes on a New Nature where I’ll be exhibiting Netscapes (image above) for the first time. This all happened very quickly about a week after the work was completed and if I had set out to target an exhibition or festival with Netscapes I couldn’t have matched the work more appropriately than Nicholas, the curator, did.

The exhibition is not a new media exhibition per se, it’s a post-new media exhibition – new media is no longer a defining characteristic but artists and works are informed by it. The exhibition bridges the transition from analogue to digital media and uses a very traditional subject, the landscape, to understand how the digital changes/reconfigures that subject. All the artists works participating in the show do this in different ways, for my part it is how a network (collapsing time and space) has a knock on effect on what a landscape can be, how networks allow us to see other places in combination from a distance.

Above: Depth Mapping (The Mountain) by Kate Steciw

The exhibition forms part of the ongoing research of the curator Nicholas O’Brien. It:

critically examines and compares the relationships that contemporary artists working with digital media have to practices started in Modernist Painting – specifically the pursuit of capturing the virtual qualities of what constitutes a landscape. How does an artist depict a space faithfully enough to show its affect on a subject? Can art capture the space between the viewer and the horizon, and where does that horizon reside now that we can digitally circumnavigate the globe? Can the digital reconcile the physical?

One way that we know how to understand the natural is through the domestic spaces of our daily lives. The interior shelter allows for reflection on what is “outside,” and as a result positions civilization away from the natural. However, as various digital and virtual landscape permeate the domestic space, our notion of what constitutes the natural has become more complicated than a simple inside/outside dichotomy. We use all forms of digital and analog technologies to simulate the natural world daily, and artists in this show point to how these tools affect the ways in which the “realness” of the natural is no longer as simple as locating it outside your window.

This newfound complication highlights the central argument of Notes on a New Nature: our varied notion of what constitutes the natural is shaped by technology, which is a narrative that can be traced all the way back to the advent of agriculture and the dawn of civilization. Through employment of various digital approaches, artists in this exhibition reference this long-standing problem we face when attempting to represent landscape and acknowledge the ways in which digital technology has forever changed our understanding of nature.

Above: Antlers Wifi by Rick Silva

Participating artists include: Duncan Alexander, Mark Beasley, Chris Collins, Petra Cortright, Theo Darst, Marjolijn Dijkman, Paul Flannery, Joe Hamilton (aka Hypergeography), Jan Robert Leegte, Sara Ludy, Garrett Lynch, Michael Ray-Vaughn, Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Nicolas Sassoon, Rick Silva, Pascual Sisto, Kate Steciw, Wes W Wilson, and Krist Wood.

319 Scholes Brooklyn, NY
November 10 – November 20, 2011
Opening: November 10, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Gallery hours: Friday and Saturday, 2:00pm – 6:00pm and by appointment

Above: Hypergeography by Joe Hamilton

Above: Strange Situation by Chris Collins

2067 is a net.art work which allows an email to become a time-capsule delivered at a chosen point in the future. The work:

focuses on its consequences : waiting, memory and correspondence but also on the aspect of relativity of our conscience towards time and Others.

It proposes an exploration of the web as a:

working model in process of our univers [sic] in which space, time and memory, as well as the dynamical process of evolution proper to any organism are forming all together a complex system of relations, that is, in fine something one could call an « intelligence ». This very special intelligence might be different from ours regarding to its capacity of organizing its time on a dynamical and parallels ways instead of a chronological one. Plunging into the entrails of an abstract form that possesses our secrets, our desires as well as our relations to the others and therefore is the more acute and useful witness of our social evolution might then be a way – de facto – of plunging into the unknown of our consciousness. We can therefore ask ourselves whether this intelligence would not be able to give us some clues regarding the fundamental questions of human being as a child building his identity reflects ours. The fact of playing with time and correspondence by sending a message in the future is a way of beginning some sort of correspondence in which desire and waiting will play their part and even may be the anguish of an Unknown out of ourselves and therefore out of control.

Via Frédérique Santune.

Blue Monochrome by Jan Robert Leegte is a readymade created from Google maps. According to the artist:

Geographic coordinates are linked to the coordinates of a website, the real space is linked to the virtual; the title of the artwork represents on a linguistic level, what can be seen on the screen image: a granulated blue surface with minimal elevations, which can immediately be associated with thick acrylic on canvas and finally with its predecessors in art history.

There is an interesting interview with the artist here on cont3xt.net.

Face to Facebook by Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio is a work which steals 1 million Facebook profiles to categorise them according to the profiles photograph and automatically populates a custom made dating site: http://www.lovely-faces.com/. The artists describe the work as follows:

In an attempt to free personal data as Facebook’s exclusive property we spent a few months downloading public information from one million profiles (including pictures). Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions…All that people wanted was to attract new people, have more relationships, to express and receive love through their digital traits. But they were trapped by Facebook owning their data and restricting their actions with primitive privacy rules…Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules. So we established a new website (lovely-faces.com) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data.

Above is a video explaining the work and below is a diagram explaining how the work was compilled and created.

Originally seen on Nettime Announce.

Views From The Internet by Penelope Umbrico

is a project that investigates the views through windows on home improvement Internet sites. The windows in these places always present views of idyllic suburban or country landscapes. There, these views are an invitation: completing the fantasy of the space of the website, they invite retreat and the promise of escape.

This is an interesting work where the isolation of views, from interiors to exteriors, through windows highlights the virtualisation of the scenes. We realise that we, online, are peering though a window at a work which itself is from a window which looks out on a distant landscape. Evidence of buildings is removed however their presence is still visible as we see skylines cut out.

Originally seen on VVork.