2024-04-25
The Centre for Contemporary Art Boston has organized an exhibition that traces the impact of the web on art from 1989 to the present day. The exhibition will be open to the public from 7 February to 20 May 2018.
Over the past 30 years, it is the invention of the World Wide Web has caused the cultural sector to undergo a significant transformation. The topic of the interdependence of the web and art still seems to be overlooked by the gallery and museum community. The exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston is advertised as the first of its kind to show how the Internet has shaped contemporary art.
The exhibition, "Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today", showcases the work of more than 60 artists, including Harun Farocki, Ed Atkins, Pierre Huyghe and Cao Fej, among others, and the artworks on display represent a diverse range of creative fields, from digital creations (video essays, virtual workstations) to analogue works.
"We think of the Internet as a social construction. We define it as a network of relationships that have changed almost every element of culture - how we eat, how we meet, how we buy, how we see. The exhibition on display is not a representation of modern technology; it is an endeavour to tell its story. The phenomenon of the Internet has accompanied us in our daily lives long enough for us to attempt to look back and verify the changes it has brought about," - says chief curator Eva Respini, who organized the exhibition together with Jeffrey De Blois.
Another strong theme in the exhibition is globalization. As the curators point out, their intention was to represent as accurately as possible the perception of the power of the Internet, which is why artists from 21 countries are participating. "Some believe that the phenomenon of the Internet results in utopian possibilities, among them Nam June Paik, whose work envisioned a world of universal connectivity. Others present a more dystopian viewpoint that dominates the world today [...]" - explains the curator of the exhibition.