The Internetional (Day #2)
The International: two day symposium about the internet
On May 22 and 23 2015 MAMA proudly presented The Internetional, a two-day symposium focusing on one of the most important areas of visual culture today: the internet. Curators, artists, and theorists discuss this topic with each other and the public in a diverse program of panel discussions, dialogues, lectures, and workshops.
This symposium was hosted in collaboration with V2_, TENT, Witte de With and WORM as part of The International House of Cozy. All recordings were done by Marèl Jap-Sam.
Below you will find recordings of all the topics that were covered on the second day of the symposium.
Situating Post Internet | Keynote Lecture
Domenico Quaranta (IT) is a contemporary art critic and curator interested in the way art reflects current technological shifts. He is a frequent collaborator with magazines and writes reviews for Flash Art, Artpulse, and Rhizome. He is the author of Beyond New Media Art (2013) and In My Computer (2011), and contributed to, edited or co-edited a number of books and catalogues, including GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (2006) and THE F.A.T. MANUAL (2013). Since 2005, he has curated and co-curated many exhibitions, including Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age (2008), RE:akt! (2009 – 2010), Playlist (2009 – 2010), and Collect the WWWorld (2011 – 2012). He lectures internationally and teaches ‘Interactive Systems’ at the Accademia di Carrara. He is the Artistic Director of the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age.
Opening the symposium’s second day, Domenico Quaranta’s lecture, which can be listened in this podcast, takes a position against the oversimplification on the term ‘Post Internet’. He plays the term in the context of surf clubs and art in networked environments from the beginning of the 21st century. To show that the Post Inter-net is not merely a strategy to give internet art some glitz and glamour for a place in the white cube, but as an integral part of what internet art has become in the last 10 years.
Walled Gardens: Art After the Internet | Lecture
Cadence Kinsey (UK) is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art at University College London. She is currently working on a book project about art after the Internet. Her research is focused on the social, political, and historical inter-relationships between technology, constructions of gender and sexuality, and theories of science and technology. Ca-dence has held visiting lectureships at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art, and Imperial College London. Her research has been published by Mute, Arcadia_Missa, and has featured in the journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
In this podcast researcher Cadence Kinsey takes a look at the key issues surrounding art and the Internet. Through the work of artists like Katja Novitskova, Kari Altman, And Ryan Trecartin she discusses themes such as ‘New Materialism’, the shaping of image networks and like-minded public, and how concepts such as ‘mass-culture’ are given new meaning online.
Pix, Pics, Picks | Panel
Josephine Bosma (NL) is a journalist and critic living and working in Amsterdam. She focuses on art in the context of the internet. She has presented radio reports and interviews on Radio Patapoe and VPRO since 1993. In 1997, Bosma became a key figure in moulding the then new sphere of critical internet discourse, as well as practice taking place in email lists such as Nettime and Rhi-zome. Her writings on net art and net culture have appeared in numerous magazines, books, catalogues, and websites, including Ars Electronica, Telepolis, Mute, DU, Metropolis M, and Frieze D/E. In 2011, her book Nettitudes – Let’s Talk Net Art was published and she became an external PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam.
Jonas Lund (SE) creates paintings, sculptures, photography, websites, and performances, incor-porating data from his studies of art world trends and behaviour. He gained an MA at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2013) and a BFA at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (2009). His solo exhibitions include Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam (2013), Boetzelaer|Nispen, Amsterdam (2014), and Steve Turner (2014, 2015), and has had work included in numerous group exhibitions, including at New Museum, New York, Xpo Gallery, Paris, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and De Hallen, Haarlem. His work has been written about in Artforum, Artnet, Rhizome, Huffington Post, Furtherfield, and Wired.
Rafaël Rozendaal (BR/NL) lives and works in New York. He is a visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. His artistic practice consists of websites, installations, lenticulars, writings, and lectures. Among other venues, his work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Venice Biennial, Valencia Biennial, Casa Franca Brasil Rio, TSCA Gallery, Tokyo, Seoul Art Square, NIMk, Amsterdam, and Stedelijk Museum project space. His work has been written about in Time Maga-zine, Wall Street Journal, Flash Art, Dazed & Confused, Interview, Wired, Purple, McSweeney’s, O Globo, Vice, Creators Project, Artreview, Metropolis M, +81, La Repubblica, and Vogue.
What is the meaning of materiality in art in the age of the Internet? Josephine Bosma talks with three artists whose practice is internet-based, or for whom digital resources and networks play an important role in their work’s production. How do they translate jpegs to sculpture and algorithms to painting? Does a different idea of materiality affect the commodification of Post Internet art?
Artist talk | lecture
Jan Robert Leegte (NL) is an artist researching the phenomenology and conceptual understanding of digital materiality, introduced by the arrival of the computer and the internet. Fascinated by the world behind the computer screen, Leegte has been exploring the sculptural possibilities of the internet since 1997, working together with the likes of JODI and Mouchette. Aiming to bridge online art with the gallery world, in 2002, he shifted focus to implementing digital materials in the context of the gallery space. Leegte studied Fine Arts at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, subsequent to studying Architecture at the University of Delft. He is professor of internet related art at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, ArtEZ in Arnhem, and the KABK in The Hague. He also cofounded BrowserBased.org, a research platform for internet related art. He lives and works in Amsterdam.
In this podcast Jan Robert Leegte speaks about the notion of materiality in his work, peppered with his vision on the political in Post Internet art.
Let’s Get Physical | Panel
Michel van Dartel (NL) is a curator at V2_, where he coordinates public events and is involved in a variety of artistic R&D projects. He also works as a freelance curator, including for the Dutch Electronic Art Festival, TENT, MU, the Energize festival, and ARTICLE biennial. He is an author, tutor at Luca Brussels University College and CODARTS University for the Arts, researcher at Hanze University of Applied Science, associate editor of the Journal for Artistic Research, advisor to the Mondriaan Fund and Creative Industries Fund NL, and a professional advisory board member at the Piet Zwart institute and the Willem de Kooning Academy. Michel van Dartel holds an MSc in Cognitive Psychology and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He currently lives in Rotterdam and Brussels.
Alberto García del Castillo (ES/BE) is a Spanish-born Latina faggot, curator, and writer. He is the co-curator of Buenos Tiempos, Int., an online exhibition space on ‘faggotry as it is today’ and a col-laborative production initiative. Its most recent productions were presented in Petunia magazine and at La Loge in Brussels. His first novel, Retrospective, was published by Shelter Press in 2014. Between 2011 and 2014, he worked as a curator at Komplot and was co-editor of YEAR magazine.
Juha van ‘t Zelfde (NL) is a Dutch-Finnish researcher, developer, and exhibition maker, working across art, music, and technology. He is currently Artistic Director at Lighthouse, Brighton. He started his career as an independent organiser and experimental electronic music DJ in Rotterdam. From 2004 – 2006, he worked for Entrée, the junior associates of the Concertgebouw and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. From 2005 – 2008, he was responsible for organising the annual Amsterdam Museum Night. From 2006 – 2008, he worked as a curator of electronic music and sound art at Lantaren/Venster in Rotterdam. The events he organised resulted in the founding of Viral Radio in 2007, an independent network for new music. Juha van ‘t Zelfde co-founded Non-fiction in 2008, VURB and De Verdieping in 2009, and Shippr in 2012. Among others, as a writer, he has contributed to De Volkskrant, Metropolis M, Volume and Monu. In 2012, he won De Hallen Cu-ratorial Scholarship for his proposal ‘DREAD – The Dizziness of Freedom’.
Gerben Willers (1982) is the owner of All Together Now: Label for Contemporary Art. From 2001 – 2008, Gerben studied at the University of Groningen, obtaining his Masters degree in Modern and Contemporary Art History. While in Groningen, he worked for the art division of VERA: Club for the International Underground and founded his first initiative for contemporary art, Gallery on the Streets in 2005. GOTS combined online and physical art experience and distribution. In 2008, he started working for Showroom MAMA in Rotterdam, curating solo and group exhibitions with key contemporary art figures. In November 2014, Gerben Willers founded All Together Now, which represents and guides contemporary artists in their careers, and is committed to the production, presentation, mediation, and sale of their work. Since contemporary art production is versatile – performances, films, plays, music, and painting can be individual or multiple elements within an artist’s practice – All Together Now presents these approaches in relevant locations, including film festivals, the internet, exhibi-tion halls, theatres, and art fairs. Gerben was one of the The Internetional’s initiators.
Michiel van Dartel talks to three curators about exhibiting Post Internet art. How does a physical exhibition space deal with art practices that operate in a network? Does the exhibition space become a node in this network, or is it an end point? Are traditional forms of exhibiting still adequate for art that comes from, or is made using the infrastructure of a network, and if not, what do the curators think the exhibition spaces of the (near) future will look like?
Artist Talk | Lecture
Harm van den Dorpel (NL) is a Dutch artist living and working in Berlin. He has had solo exhibitions at Abrons Art Center and American Medium, NYC, Neumeister Bar-Am, Berlin, and been in several noteworthy group exhibitions, including Art Post-Internet, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, Image Employment, MoMA PS1, NYC, and Free, the New Museum, NYC. Van den Dorpel’s work includes online projects, such as the Dissociations website, as well as wall works and sculptures. His work aims to ‘equalise any supposed hierarchy in medium or actuality’. He presents and examines his own work on self-programmed intuitive and associative information systems. These reflect on the algorithmic and market driven organisation of existing popular social media platforms.
In this podcast Harm Van Den Dorpel speaks about his work and methodologies, bitcoins, and his ideas about being labeled as a ‘key figure’ in Post Internet art.
