Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, London
Danny Birchall enjoys the digital delights on offer in this exhibition that brings art and the internet together
The conceit of Electronic Superhighway is to tell the history of art and the internet backwards. While this year has already seen two shows that capture a moment or method in contemporary digital art (Right Here, Right Now, at the Lowry, Salford, and Big Bang Data at Somerset House, London), this exhibition at east London’s Whitechapel Gallery puts the moment in its context, starting with a survey of contemporary art as it sees the internet, working back to its antecedents in the 1960s.
A bit of history is more than welcome: the explosive newness of digital art can often cause a temporary blindness to the past. But this conceit has also allowed curator Omar Kholeif to effectively make one show out of two: a survey of contemporary art’s fascination with the culture of the internet and a history of networked and computer art.
The opening gallery is, at first glance, a jumbled riot of reactions to life lived online. At one end of the spectrum of seriousness, Olaf Breuning’s Text Butt (2015) offers a caricature of fascination with the ephemeral: conversational banalities emerge in iPhone text bubbles from between two pert buttocks. At the other end is James Bridle’s Homo Sacer (2014), a friendly hologram offering recitations of the rights of European citizens and how the state may abrogate them.
Hugging the walls around graphic and sculptural works, including supersized Instagrammed images, kinetic emoticon sculptures and spam karaoke, are a surprising number and variety of paintings. Petra Cortright’s digitally generated canvasses layer up Photoshop effects and artefacts, while Celia Hempton’s smaller series of oil portraits, Chat Random (2014-15), depicts the features of strangers encountered in a matrix of webcams.
Perhaps the most tangible grasp on the variety of perspectives is offered by three large-screen video works that anchor the downstairs gallery. The internet as a space of virtual possibility is represented by Jacolby Satterwhite’s En Plein Air: Music of Objective Romance (2016), in which high-definition avatars perform three-dimensional explosions of queer desire, skittering against a sketchy backdrop of his schizophrenic mother’s drawings.
The impossibility of definitive knowledge in an age of ubiquitous information is at the heart of Camille Henrot’s Gross Fatigue (2013) – a spoken-word mash-up of universal origin myths soundtracking a restless desktop exploration of cultural artefacts and found images from the internet.
Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) is more than a decade old but is still a zeitgeisty teen party of self- obsession and mesmerising video overlays. Trecartin’s characters demand to be continually recorded, shrieking: “Why aren’t you documenting me?”
His parody of self- representation is in sharp contrast to Zach Blas’ Facial Weaponization Suite (2011), with its obscene pink-blob masks – designed to stymie the facial recognition technologies of surveillance cameras – found among a trade fair-parody display of branded “queer technologies” that include “gay bombs” and “transcoder” software. If you log on to the Wi-Fi provided by Trevor Paglen and Jacob Applebaum’s Autonomy Cube (2014) you can temporarily join the globally anonymous Tor network, which offers privacy of a different kind.
Connecting art and technology
Upstairs, history begins with a display that isn’t strictly chronological, but features overlapping phases. The terms of the art-network relationship are quickly reversed by artists who see the internet as medium rather than culture. Jan Robert Leegte’s Scrollbar Composition (2001) seems like formal modernism in contrast to some of the works downstairs, with its three presentations of the same web page in different browsers. Works here also raise questions about the conservation of digital artworks: paradoxically, some of the most recent works are also the most vulnerable, being based on ever-precarious new technology.
Nam June Paik’s Internet Dream (1994), a massive wall of 52 hyperactively flickering monitors, sits opposite Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), an early work of browser art whose small screen subdivides into fragments of a relationship in crisis. The juxtaposition suggests not just a shift to a more personal scale, but also the formation of canons. Paik is a well-established art star; Lialina is on the way to becoming part of the official story of internet art.
The journey feels more rushed and less certain as 30 years of video art, from Lillian F Schwartz’s UFO (1971) to Lawrence Weiner’s Blue Moon Over (2001), appear in a blocky row of 10 gallery monitors. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s interactive video about an agoraphobic actress, Lorna (1979-82), is played in an exquisite simulacrum of its own set. But it may also be a reminder that other histories of interactive computer art have gone missing.
The apparatus of technology eventually retreats, revealing early paper-based works. Hiroshi Kawano’s 1972 work – Untitled, (Red Tree) – looks like a deconstructed Mondrian but is in fact the result of training an IBM computer to paint what it had “seen”. Ulla Wiggen’s paintings of circuit boards bring us almost full circle to Cortright’s images of technology mediated through the canvas. It also becomes clear that many of the artists in the historical sections now look like pioneers, creating new relationships between art and technology, in a way that the works downstairs mostly don’t.
Starting point
The show finally settles on a pair of possible starting points for its exercise in time travel – 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering was a series of performances in New York in 1966, conducted by an alliance of artists and engineers, and Cybernetic Serendipity was a similarly groundbreaking exhibition by artists, scientists and technologists at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968. Both are represented by cases of artefacts and documentation, evidence of art history rather than artworks. It is beside the point to note that electronic art has an older pedigree than either of these exhibitions. By positing them as originating moments, Kholeif might be asking whether the history of art’s engagement with electronic networks can be fully understood through individual artworks alone. Perhaps it is only networks of artists that can truly relate to the concept of the network.
But it also begs the question of whether his show is in the same league, crystallising a moment in which art meets the internet. And while it’s stunning to have such a cornucopia of digital delights on offer, in as serious a gallery as the Whitechapel, even in terms of diversity something isn’t quite coming together. Electronic Superhighway is educational, exhilarating and eye-opening, but it isn’t seminal.
Danny Birchall is the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection, London
Main funders Supported by Phillips; Balassi Institute; Hungarian Cultural Centre London; Institute Für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. Stuttgart; Korean Cultural Institute Outset Estonia; Embassy of Sweden in London; Embassy of The Netherlands; Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Exhibition design and display materials Christopher Aldgate
Lighting John Johnson
Transport Martinspeed
Exhibition ends 15 May
Admission £11.95 adult
A bit of history is more than welcome: the explosive newness of digital art can often cause a temporary blindness to the past. But this conceit has also allowed curator Omar Kholeif to effectively make one show out of two: a survey of contemporary art’s fascination with the culture of the internet and a history of networked and computer art.
The opening gallery is, at first glance, a jumbled riot of reactions to life lived online. At one end of the spectrum of seriousness, Olaf Breuning’s Text Butt (2015) offers a caricature of fascination with the ephemeral: conversational banalities emerge in iPhone text bubbles from between two pert buttocks. At the other end is James Bridle’s Homo Sacer (2014), a friendly hologram offering recitations of the rights of European citizens and how the state may abrogate them.
Hugging the walls around graphic and sculptural works, including supersized Instagrammed images, kinetic emoticon sculptures and spam karaoke, are a surprising number and variety of paintings. Petra Cortright’s digitally generated canvasses layer up Photoshop effects and artefacts, while Celia Hempton’s smaller series of oil portraits, Chat Random (2014-15), depicts the features of strangers encountered in a matrix of webcams.
Perhaps the most tangible grasp on the variety of perspectives is offered by three large-screen video works that anchor the downstairs gallery. The internet as a space of virtual possibility is represented by Jacolby Satterwhite’s En Plein Air: Music of Objective Romance (2016), in which high-definition avatars perform three-dimensional explosions of queer desire, skittering against a sketchy backdrop of his schizophrenic mother’s drawings.
The impossibility of definitive knowledge in an age of ubiquitous information is at the heart of Camille Henrot’s Gross Fatigue (2013) – a spoken-word mash-up of universal origin myths soundtracking a restless desktop exploration of cultural artefacts and found images from the internet.
Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) is more than a decade old but is still a zeitgeisty teen party of self- obsession and mesmerising video overlays. Trecartin’s characters demand to be continually recorded, shrieking: “Why aren’t you documenting me?”
His parody of self- representation is in sharp contrast to Zach Blas’ Facial Weaponization Suite (2011), with its obscene pink-blob masks – designed to stymie the facial recognition technologies of surveillance cameras – found among a trade fair-parody display of branded “queer technologies” that include “gay bombs” and “transcoder” software. If you log on to the Wi-Fi provided by Trevor Paglen and Jacob Applebaum’s Autonomy Cube (2014) you can temporarily join the globally anonymous Tor network, which offers privacy of a different kind.
Connecting art and technology
Upstairs, history begins with a display that isn’t strictly chronological, but features overlapping phases. The terms of the art-network relationship are quickly reversed by artists who see the internet as medium rather than culture. Jan Robert Leegte’s Scrollbar Composition (2001) seems like formal modernism in contrast to some of the works downstairs, with its three presentations of the same web page in different browsers. Works here also raise questions about the conservation of digital artworks: paradoxically, some of the most recent works are also the most vulnerable, being based on ever-precarious new technology.
Nam June Paik’s Internet Dream (1994), a massive wall of 52 hyperactively flickering monitors, sits opposite Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), an early work of browser art whose small screen subdivides into fragments of a relationship in crisis. The juxtaposition suggests not just a shift to a more personal scale, but also the formation of canons. Paik is a well-established art star; Lialina is on the way to becoming part of the official story of internet art.
The journey feels more rushed and less certain as 30 years of video art, from Lillian F Schwartz’s UFO (1971) to Lawrence Weiner’s Blue Moon Over (2001), appear in a blocky row of 10 gallery monitors. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s interactive video about an agoraphobic actress, Lorna (1979-82), is played in an exquisite simulacrum of its own set. But it may also be a reminder that other histories of interactive computer art have gone missing.
The apparatus of technology eventually retreats, revealing early paper-based works. Hiroshi Kawano’s 1972 work – Untitled, (Red Tree) – looks like a deconstructed Mondrian but is in fact the result of training an IBM computer to paint what it had “seen”. Ulla Wiggen’s paintings of circuit boards bring us almost full circle to Cortright’s images of technology mediated through the canvas. It also becomes clear that many of the artists in the historical sections now look like pioneers, creating new relationships between art and technology, in a way that the works downstairs mostly don’t.
Starting point
The show finally settles on a pair of possible starting points for its exercise in time travel – 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering was a series of performances in New York in 1966, conducted by an alliance of artists and engineers, and Cybernetic Serendipity was a similarly groundbreaking exhibition by artists, scientists and technologists at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968. Both are represented by cases of artefacts and documentation, evidence of art history rather than artworks. It is beside the point to note that electronic art has an older pedigree than either of these exhibitions. By positing them as originating moments, Kholeif might be asking whether the history of art’s engagement with electronic networks can be fully understood through individual artworks alone. Perhaps it is only networks of artists that can truly relate to the concept of the network.
But it also begs the question of whether his show is in the same league, crystallising a moment in which art meets the internet. And while it’s stunning to have such a cornucopia of digital delights on offer, in as serious a gallery as the Whitechapel, even in terms of diversity something isn’t quite coming together. Electronic Superhighway is educational, exhilarating and eye-opening, but it isn’t seminal.
Danny Birchall is the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection, London
Project data
Cost UndisclosedMain funders Supported by Phillips; Balassi Institute; Hungarian Cultural Centre London; Institute Für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. Stuttgart; Korean Cultural Institute Outset Estonia; Embassy of Sweden in London; Embassy of The Netherlands; Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Exhibition design and display materials Christopher Aldgate
Lighting John Johnson
Transport Martinspeed
Exhibition ends 15 May
Admission £11.95 adult