“Can we please play the internet?”
Janine DeFeo, Paul Zaba, Eleonora Sovrani, Andrea Buran, Nathan Llow, Angus Tarnawsky and Ilya Milstein
11 Apr → 11 May 2014
Can we please play the internet? is an exhibition of new work by artists from Italy, Australia, the US and the UK who engage with the internet as a ubiquitous presence in projects unfolding both online and in the gallery.
Andrea Buran and Eleonora Sovrani explore different strategies of organisation and representationin Fortune Cookie, an ongoing research project to expose the idiosyncrasies of search algorithms. As we become increasingly comfortable with information at our fingertips, Buran and Sovrani’s online experiments remind us that we are using a tool, albeit a very impressive one, in the first place.
Based in New York and Bristol respectively, Janine DeFeo and Paul Zaba collaborate remotely to produce the work, If you are looking for information about historical events or other things that happened in the real world, you are on the wrong page! Through Wikipedia itself, DeFeo and Zaba test the notion of fact and fiction, all the while navigating the possibilities, dilemmas and ethics of “the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit”.
Nathan Liow and Angus Tarnawsky expose sonic phenomena associated with the vast physical network that enables the internet. Artifacts is a slowly evolving feedback conversation created by a live acoustic piano performance in the gallery, broadcast immediately to NYC then returned and amplified through speakers and mixed with the existing performance. Within this process, inaudible sounds become apparent and distortion begins to erode and decay what is heard. The internet itself leaves a unique signature and becomes an organic third party working alongside the artists.
Ilya Milstein will be presenting excerpts from a narrative in three parts, staggered over the course of the exhibition. Staged within an Argentinian apartment in the late 1980’s, the narrative centres upon a failed attempt to create an alternate to the World Wide Web and poses the question - have we been thwarted of a better internet?
Posing more questions than answers, Can we please play the internet? is about broadening the user experience and the physical context of what we have come to understand as Internet Art.
Nathan Liow and Angus Tarnawsky's performance Artifacts will be taking place during the following times:
Saturday 12 April 2014, 1pm.
Saturday 3 May 2014, 1pm.
Saturday 10 May 2014, 1pm.
Janine DeFeo is a historian of contemporary art, currently living and working in the greater New York City area. She has studied modern cultural history in Oxford and London. Her research focuses on (and tries to answer methodologically) the question of what constitutes criticality and radical politics in contemporary art.
Paul Zaba is a sound artist, musician and composer, now living and working in Bristol. After having graduated in 2011 from Oxford University, Paul studied Composition and Sound Art at Birmingham Conservatoire for a year, under Richard Causton and Tychonas Michialidis. He is associated with the Young Echo Collective in Bristol, and has had work exhibited in London and Glasgow.
Eleonora Sovrani is an artist, video maker and researcher based in Brussels. Her collaborative work with artist Andrea Buran was featured at Schiume Festival, Forte Marghera (2013). In addition to ongoing projects she will participate in the Home Workspace Program in Beirut, beginning November 2013.
Andrea Buran is a graduate in Visual Communication and Multimedia from IUAV University of Venice who specialises in visual communications and web design. His thesis project is an experimental research on the cinema and comics media forms which inquires new possibilities for their reciprocal remediation on the Web.
Nathan Llow is an award-winning pianist, composer and producer based in Melbourne, Australia. His recent projects include a words and music collaboration with multi-award winning vocalist and lyricist Nicola Watson (Newmarket), original music for the feature-length film “Play It Safe” (developed alongside Australian MC and lyricist Mantra), and electronic music for a range of film, video game, and digital media projects including two award-winning remixes for Triple J.
Angus Tarnawsky is an Australian drummer, sound artist and composer currently based in Brooklyn. In 2009, he was awarded the Dr. Phillip Law Award and Foote Trust Award from the University of Melbourne for his research into electro-acoustic drum-kit theory. In addition to his performance work, he curates In Context Music, a record label exploring the notion of context in electronic and electro-acoustic music.
Ilya Milstein is an artist based in Melbourne. He creates narrative works primarily using video, text and illustration, and is presently completing studies at the Victorian College of the Arts.