黑料不打烊

Copenhagen Contemporary and Chronus Art Center is pleased to announce the presentation of a group exhibition titled We=Link: Sideways, featuring twenty-two works by twenty-seven artists and artist collectives, from the pioneers of net art to millennials. The works on display and online span three decades of net art practice, from arguably the first internet-era artwork of the Thing BBS in 1991 to the most current production continuing to evolve as the exhibition opens.

Often referred to as the last Avant-garde of the twentieth century, the phenomenon largely dubbed as net art appearing in the early 鈥�90s with the advent of the internet enjoyed an unrestrained flourishing period of prolific experimental, creative and critical engagement with the nascent new-media-fueled economy and its cultural and social ramifications. By 1997 the institutional acknowledgment of the once peripheral and fringe art practice along with the commodification of the internet made net art seem, according to art historian Dieter Daniels, to have 鈥渞eached a dead end or turning point.鈥�

This exhibition takes the purported net art鈥檚 鈥渄ead end鈥� as a new starting point to chart a discursive trajectory of the practices since then, in the many manifestations of network-based art. Instead of prescribing it a categorical definition, the exhibition attempts to uncover the variegated developments, diverse strategies, critical positions and aesthetic experiments after the crash of the dot.com bubble, amidst the prevalence of neoliberalism and cognitive capitalism, and the rise of populism and nationalism. Sideways reveals the continuum of the Avant-garde 鈥渘ettitudes鈥� inherent in the works of these artists.

The exhibition comprises the first artist-run Bulletin Board System that preceded the ensuing popularity of social networks and various expressions of artistic strategies and critical technologies aiming to disrupt a corporate monopoly of the network infrastructure and protocols, to expose the intrinsic logics of network security and surveillance in provocative stances as well as playful innuendos, and to intercept or re-appropriate commercial or institutional modus operandi. At the same time, the experimental nature of net art has continued to develop its varying aesthetic propositions along with the new possibilities and challenges of rapidly changing technologies.