A Web art exhibition forces visitors to confront the past

Saved e-mails, Geocities pages, an emulation of Windows 98. These are all parts of the deleted Web – the Web that is no longer easily accessible. And they are all part of a museum exhibition entitled "Art Happens Here: A Clear Art Anthology", currently being held at the New Museum.

The name of the exhibition "Art Happens Here" comes from a 1997 scheme by an artist duo named MTAA, representing a flash symbol between two computers and an arrow pointing to it, indicating that "the art happens here. " wanted to show people that the works of art were not shown on a screen but that it was rather a meeting with other users ", explains Michael Connor, Artistic Director of Rhizome The edge, "There is no object. The whole idea of ​​an art on the net is based on things brought together in a living way. "

"The Art Happens Here" suggests that Web archives can also be art. Different web artifacts from different cultures, circumstances and Internet pockets are kept in the exhibition. But, while creating art, many of these artists have left raw comments on extremely important historical events. For example, there is a Miao Ying Blind spot, a Chinese dictionary with 2,000 whitened terms, which reflects the terms that would be censored when you try to search them on Google in China in 2007.

Photo of Amelia Holowaty Krales

In an interview with Rhizome, the digital art organization behind "The Art Happens Here," Miao explains that she was inspired by censorship awareness in China because "the Chinese do not realize not what censorship is; for them, it is only a note at the bottom of the page. But at the same time, the white terms in his dictionary remain hidden for visitors to the museum. Moreover, they are not translated, so visitors speaking only English will have no chance.

The issues raised by Miao in his exhibition have also been the subject of quite recent news: many Chinese users of Twitter have disappeared from the platform after the police crackdown over the past semester. Some have been arrested for publication on the blocked platform on China. Others lamented the disappearance and sometimes self-censorship of important voices on the platform, some of them having served as social commentary essential to a country closed to criticism.

Access returns again and again as a question in the exhibition. In Morehshin Allahyari The monument distributed, Hardware speculation: ISIS, true Iraqi art objects destroyed by ISIS in 2015 are restored as 3D printed models. Originally, Allahyari displayed all these models, but he quickly realized that they were only shown to Western audiences and not to the intended audience, which is reminiscent of strangely the way Western museums have exhibited stolen or looted artifacts from around the world. during colonialism. It was an uncomfortable association for Allahyari. She has finally removed most models except one, according to Connor. There is an SD card with all the data of the models that it has sealed inside the model that remains displayed.

Photo of Amelia Holowaty Krales

Archives help preserve the meaning of what has been lost. "How can we recognize what is lost?" Asks Connor, who presents art on the Internet as an exploration of this and other issues. "The art happens here" also highlights other tragedies in our history: the September 11 attacks in New York and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. These works of art are hidden deeper in "Art Happens Here," but they are at the heart of what is explored here.

Photo of Amelia Holowaty Krales

Wolfgang Staehle's Untitled from 2001 is a webcast of the Manhattan skyline during the September 11 attacks. Staehle originally created three webcasts, one in New York, one in Berlin and one at the Benedictine Monastery in Comburg, Germany. Fuzzy images consisted of still images updated every three seconds. He had planned the exhibition to explore "what happens when nothing happens," he told Rhizome, but once airplanes crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center, his art was turned into a documentary of senseless violence.

The duo of YoHa artists, Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji, produced the exhibition. lungs in 2005, which uses the Nazi data collected at the time thanks to IBM technology and makes it a memorial of software poems. The data provided information on some of the 4,500 slave workers who worked in an ammunition factory during the Second World War.

YoHa has written an application to count the total lung capacity of the workers, and then reproduce the sound of the artists' breathing to illustrate how it was breathing. The exhibition was a way to humanize the raw data. Harwood said in a 2010 interview that he was interested in "exploring the relationship between IBM and such conditions to help the Nazis treat slaves." The issues raised by YoHa are still relevant several years later.

"The art happens here" continues until May 26th. The New Museum in New York is closed on Mondays and pays what you want on Thursday night.