Elastic Reality
Beyond the Exhibition: New Interfaces for Contemporary Art in Europe
Sans titre, Pierre-Yves Boisramé. Image: Marcos Morilla
Almost twenty years have elapsed since the use of Internet became available to all, and about five since it became accessible from anywhere via mobile hand-held terminals. These major technical innovations have profoundly modified our understanding of the world. Indeed, we now live permanently connected, in a time/space in perpetual flux - a sort of uchronia in which this perception evolves with the increasingly fast flow of information transmitted from everywhere, and whose authors, whether known or not, are just as much professionals and experts as they can be our next-door neighbour, or a hacker ensconced in front of his screen: we participate in the making of a collective realm that has become global, and fragmented.
This ever more complex environment blends the virtual and the real, the dataflow with the landscape. Whereas new terms are regularly coined to describe this state of things, none truly encapsulate the multi layered realm we inhabit. Hence, comes the notion of elastic reality, which was inspired by the works on display in this exhibition. The participating artists not only play with these distortions of the “real”, but also pioneer new ways to interact with their work. The formal exploration of new interfaces is as much part of their preoccupation, as is the content of their work, and the kind of commentary on the current state of reality we live in.
Curator: Benjamin Weil
Artists: Théodora Barat, Véronique Béland, Pierre-Yves Boisramé, Vincent Ciciliato, Maya Da-Rin, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Joachim Olender, Zahra Poonawala, David Rokeby and Dorothéé Smith
Co-produced by: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains (France), Contemporary Art Center, CAC Vilnius (Lithuania)
Collaborating Patron:
With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union
