art | internet by chloé roubert
daily life temporality human condition generations visuality
within which all things exist and move
By bringing these two obviously very different artists together – separated by time, artistic approach and conceptual framework – I wanted to show that their works have uncanny resemblances. If these similarities are at first glance mostly formal, their images are also united by the access they provide to moments past and by their injection of meaning into banal occurrences. These specific photographic attributes that are now taken for granted were, at the time of the photographic invention, nervously felt as deeply dissolving the boundaries between ‘observer and observed, subject and object, self and other, virtual and actual, representation and real’ 3 – the very ideas reiterated in today’s debates about the Internet and its agency over ownership, privacy, surveillance and identity. The exhibit’s title ‘within which all things exist and move’, came from a definition of space – because the theme of the exhibit was not limited to the implications of Rafman’s Net Art or the connotations of Szilasi’s work, but rather embraced the questions that their combination suggests: What is space? Where do we place ourselves within it? What technologies have we created to make sense of it, and how can these devices become agents in this understanding? Do these questions change as archival machines change? Looking back, the biggest success of the exhibit was to have Szilasi and Rafman’s public confront these similarities. Szilasi did not know of Google Street View’s existence before the project and most of Rafman’s public would not have considered Szilasi’s work as particularly relevant to today’s debates surrounding web culture and virtual archiving. And yet this juxtaposition enables us to rethink what the ‘simplest’ of photographs and the ‘weirdest’ of Google Street Views have in common: they are both part of the cosmology of fears and desires that, since the 1830s, the camera has elicited in the way we make sense of the space around us.
The emergence of the Internet naturally saw the rise of artists using the World Wide Web both to comment on its existence and reveal its agency in the non-virtual world. Often deeply rooted in theory, Internet art uses the medium’s infinite aspects – online images, user-generated content, websites, code, algorithms, virtual communities, social networks – as medium, subject matter and inspiration. Representative of this movement is Nine-Eyes, an on-going series of images selected from Google Street View by artist Jon Rafman. Launched in May 2007 and consistent with Google’s clerical mission ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, Google Street View consists of sending moving vehicles equipped with nine-lens cameras to capture panoramic street-level views of all public space. Begun in 2009, Nine-Eyes is an opulent collection of unplanned public moments captured by a mechanical device and selected by the artist – road kills, abandoned buildings in California, lustful kisses in Paris or prostitutes in the outskirts of Milan. Rafman has never been present for the actual occurrence of these instances but through his collection of their web-accessible reproductions wants to ‘both celebrate Google’s technologies and critique the culture and consciousness it reflects. [My] study of the virtual worlds of modern life reveals these virtual worlds to be roundabout ways of expressing the varieties of modes of alienation in contemporary life.’ 1 In September of 2010 I curated an exhibition in Montreal’s Art45 Gallery to place the issues raised by Nine-Eyes in the context of the older human hesitation towards technological advancements in the fields of photography and archiving. I did so by juxtaposing some of Nine-Eyes images with the argentic photographs of the well-established Canadian artist Gabor Szilasi. Working for over fifty years mostly in Québec, his photographs capture the everyday experience of ordinary people, isolated townships, charged interiors, prosaic wastelands, commercial signs and disregarded facades. These are all things – animate or inanimate – that by their day-to-day ordinariness would have been inaccessible or forgotten if it had not been for the photographer’s patient excursions, sensible eye and humanistic curiosity: ‘I like what is overly familiar to me. I like to work in an arena where I am accepted as a photographer. But that is solely because I like to confront and talk to people.’ 2
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1 Jon Rafman in Roubert, Chloé. Within which all things exist and move (catalogue). Montreal, 2010, p. 25 2 Gabor Szilasi in Roubert, Chloé. Within which all things exist and move (catalogue). Montreal, 2010, p. 19 3 Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography . Cambridge, Mass : The MIT Press, 1997. p. 101
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