The works in Faultlines consider the desires, fictions and anxieties embedded in online communities and also reveal how "real-world" issues, such as commerce and international politics, drive relationships in the virtual sphere just as they do offline.
My favorite pieces were automated beacon, the dumpster, and the myspace intro playlist. They play well into the thesis of the show, and the interface of "the dumpster" is really a fantastic way to experience the endless supply of personal internet ventings in a way that allows you to really feel overwhelmed by the size of the internet.
The interesting thing about having an online exhibition is that there is no ownership to the curator or webspace. The links in the show are accessible without ever going to rhizome's website, and therefore the exhibition acts more like a mixtape than a museum style show with actual objects. There is no need to claim ownership of organizing these works, the show is created much more for the experience of the work than the curatorial pat on the back, or any sort of monetary gain.
1 comment:
I agree that the automated beacon, the dumpster and the myspace intro playlist are all really great.
this one's good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rWvpAheg4s&feature=PlayList&p=EBF5D6DC4589D7B7&index=5
I really like what Pat said about comparing these works to a "mixtape". DJ's have been seeking out obscure or forgotten recordings to cut up, loop and mix for their own material for many decades already... This music, that takes all of recorded music/sound as its starting point, gives us a fragmented experience that is extremely abstract because it is so impossible - the music defies laws of space and time by combining recorded artifacts thought to be exclusive and closed systems. I think this abstraction in some way leads to a different consciousness about music itself is. It's as though we gain an outside perspective on what it is to be a human making music. The fact that so much music (from so many disparate times and places) can be accessed and reproduced through speakers does, I believe, lead to a singular unification of the human musical act. I know, it's pretty cracked out.
It seems that idea is coming up now with the internet and user-editable content (and even more media saturation) What all of these works "do" is make us aware of the internet's unbelievable size and scope, yet each one provides a different means of "seeing" or "navigating" through it. Like with music that's "about" other music, this internet art is "about" the internet and it is really also giving us that "outside perspective", but in a much bigger way because the internet is the internet! These works access the user content (that's some mass-scale art, p.s.) of SO MANY ordinary people's blogs and MySpace profiles. These new collages don't draw from the traditional history of Western art or even the old "big media" source material (TV, recorded music), they're from 15 year-old girls with blogs and gamer "dweebs" with video cameras and cracked software! That's pretty intense. And there's going to be so much content and so much variety of content - it's pretty overwhelming indeed. But the achievement of works like these is that outside perspective on a much bigger scale. Might the fact that so much media content (from so many disparate times and places) can be accessed and reproduced via the internet lead to a singular unification of human action period? Wow, that's even more cracked out.
[Editor's Note: I know this sounds like esoteric bullshit. But, I went there. Or tried to.]
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