QUARANT-iMAL : while we are all stuck at home we want to share some mind-tingling online content with you.
Today, we’re very pleased to announce that we’ll be taking part in this special online exhibition called "We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces".
We=Link is a project initiated by Chronus Art Center (CAC) (Shanghai) in collaboration with 10 international art organisations. The works presented are network native, exploring the potential of mobile technologies, particularly with a creative and critical appropriation of various social media platforms. Through this exhibition, all institutions involved use this opportunity to recapitulate the importance of net art practice.
For this exhibition, iMAL has contributed in proposing a work by French artist Raphaël Bastide, ‘evasive.tech’, an online artwork routine that he is developing throughout the quarantine period.
We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces
Due to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak rapidly raging throughout the world, we are experiencing an unprecedented historical moment, and social and economic routines have been interrupted, including cultural programming. More than ever, art remains an essential force to galvanize and rejuvenate. In lieu of a physical exhibition restrained by the lockdown, Chronus Art Center sent out an open call to the international media art community to initiate a special online exhibition as a response to the current uncertainty and a time of anxiety.
Titled “We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces”, alluding to the American actor Jack Nicholson’s iconic movie Five Easy Pieces with a subtle twist on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform, it will be exhibited online in collaboration with a network of other hosting institutions. The works presented in this exhibition are network native, exploring the potential of mobile technologies, particularly with a creative and critical appropriation of various social media platforms. In conjunction with this online exhibition, the participating institutions also aim to use this opportunity to recapitulate the importance of net art practice, which was crucial in contributing to early discourse on internet culture and constitutive during the formative years of new media art as a genre, continuing to play a vital role in shaping the dynamics of an ever more pervasively networked society.
The title “We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces” denotes a community of solidarity as a network of empowerment. The reference to Five Easy Pieces prompts an evocation of an implicit existential anxiety, a sense of estrangement and soul finding: Ten Uneasy Pieces indeed. On the other hand, the title “We=Link" elicits a silver lining—a streak of hope to carry on.
Rather than an explicit outcry against the current public health crisis, this online project addresses a general state of humanity that is under pressing peril of natural and social disruptions and precariousness, demonstratively manifested in the coronavirus outbreak, which is partially the cause of the magnitude of the virus itself and partially beholden to a failure of governance.
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RAPHAEL BASTIDE – evasive.tech (2020)
For this exhibition, iMAL has contributed in proposing a work by French artist Raphaël Bastide. evasive.tech is an online artwork routine by Raphaël Bastide throughout the quarantine period (starting 17/03/2020, ending ?). Like his previous web-based project otherti.me, evasive.tech is a series of episodes, each being envisioned and coded on a daily basis. evasive.tech develops a narrative through composition and transcripts.
Raphaël Bastide creates works such as transitional musical instruments, fragile web pages, ambiguous computer programs, critical network architectures, revisable and version-controlled sculptures, and quarantine-driven coding performances. He lives in Paris where he teaches and bakes bread.
Artists
Raphaël Bastide, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne, JODI, LI Weiyi, Evan Roth, Slime Engine, Helmut Smits, XU Wenkai (aka aaajiao), Yangachi and YE Funa
Curated by
ZHANG Ga
Organised by
Chronus Art Center
Co-commissioned by
Chronus Art Center (Shanghai); Art Center Nabi (Seoul); and Rhizome of the New Museum (New York)
Co-hosting Institutions
Chronus Art Center (Shanghai); Art Center Nabi (Seoul); Rhizome of the New Museum (New York); Arts at CERN (Geneva); e-flux (New York); HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel); iMAL (Brussels); LABORATORIA Art & Science Foundation (Moscow); Leonardo/ISAST; MU Hybrid Art House (Eindhoven); SETI AIR/SETI Institute (Mountain View); V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam).
This online exhibition is also presented as a project of First Look: New Art Online, a New Museum online program and archived here provided by Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST)
