An increased access to information and content through the internet has opened the art world to welcome digital art as a medium. The Whitechapel gallery is just one establishment in recent years that has welcomed an infiltration of visual artists using digital technologies, coinciding with the internet to create, comment and express their perceptions of a world split between online and offline. The exhibition title comes from a quote by Korean video artist Nam June Paik in 1974, who foresaw the global networks of information that would one day encapsulate our world and used the term ‘Electronic Superhighway’ to describe it.
The exhibition is curated around a reverse chronological order as we move through the galleries we are walking back into time. Its fitting to first encounter some of our contemporary cultural motifs. This includes blown up text from an iMessage, hacked video games and screens projecting images appropriated from Instagram. There is a certain comfort associated with this point of the exhibition. A computer literate audience is able to navigate the spaces with a fair amount of sensibility but there is still slight uncanny atmosphere from the hyperreal nuances surrounding the work. On the surface Internet art seems to be underpinned by absurdity and surrealism, formulating in a strive to be novel but also be surrounded by a technological influence. This influence had resulted in an aversion from a more traditional leaning art world for a long time but it now seems that the accessibility of the internet has filtered through into the gallery space and become widely accepted. The fact that this exhibition has taken over the whole of the Whitechapel Gallery just shows the greater trend that art is delving into the online technological world. The comprehensive approach outlines a conscious evolution within art that has roots going back to 1966. 50 years on, our embrace of new a genre feels natural. For the most part the work fits the gallery comfortably. The mix of projections, screens, digital prints, sculpture and installation, showcases a group of artists who are challenging and shifting our perception of the artistic and to push and pull this line between online and offline.
The exhibition features a lot of art with over 70 artists in total. We are confronted with an extensive exposition of an online world. In its very nature the internet is all encompassing and there is reflection of this within the galleries. From work that explores the selfie, the chatroom and the connection of people to more sinister themes of surveillance and militarisation. I felt slightly overwhelmed by the amount of projects and individual pieces within the space, although there was some really interesting work it was hard to get involved and unpack the ideas of the artists when your been inundated to so much varied work. In some sense this large amount work simply reflects the plethora of content the internet makes available to us. Exhibiting within the gallery requires a certain amount of conformity. Some of the work being shown has specifically been created for the web, some explicitly for the gallery and others span this widening gap of work that fits into both online and offline contexts.
Image Atlas, created by Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz, is one piece of work that has retained its online characteristic despite being transferred into the gallery space. Image atlas is a site that transforms google image search results to incorporated the top 5 listings of any search term from 57 countries countries across the world. The work exists in the space as a webpage and is reliant on interaction with its audience. The webpage is displayed on an iPad as well as reflected on a large projection. The iPad has been custom coded to mean that all other activity other than use of this webpage is not permitted. This technical decisions locks the function of this device and allows to not just be a iPad in a room hooked up to a projector. The work addresses cultural assumptions and differences that google aggregates between various regions of our globe. Of course this becomes more or less obvious from what search term is being used. There is an aspect of reliance on the audience to provide search terms relevant enough to produce a wide range of imagery. Image Atlas is part of a collection of works curated by Rhizome. Rhizome are an organisation who specialise in the support of digital new media work in an artistic context. Within this section of the exhibition encounter many interactive works that heavily incur the web as a platform for creativity.
For me much of the work created for Electronic Superhighway relies on the the visceral. There is an incredibly introspective attitude and association with digital art. The format of creating an exhibition around the fact that this is digital art almost heightens theses attitudes and the work fails, on some part, to escape into any traditional acceptance. There is a certain fragility created by the heavy reliance on technological devices used to showcase the work. In some sense it attaches the work to this idea of performance where the image vanishes into nothing one the projector or screen or computer is shut down. We feel a comfort in the work permanently attached to the walls. Although Thomas Ruff's large dark room print or Jon Rafman’s 3D printed bust’s are inspired and reliant on digital technology they have a physicality to them that provide some sort of connection to the viewer. Despite this the work that is supported by screens or projection does not suffer any sort of detraction, it is merely the interoperation of two differing mediums.
I feel that Electronic Super Highway creates a generous bold stage for a dynamic range of work, tacking themes that are coming to the forefront of contemporary artists. Although this strain of artistic work only just be starting to be accepted by a general audience, the exhibition its self is testament to the development of digital art over 50 years. These paths that have been paved for the likes of myself and my contemporaries, and stem from any artistic experiment with technology. The development of new technologies has allowed the practitioner to continue experimenting 50 years later. The rapid shifts in technology, in part thanks to the internet, has accelerated our experimentation. It some sense we are only just starting to understand and accept this new method of artistic interruption and I would say that the next 50 years is going to be even more considered, dynamic and exciting.