MAAP’s 2006 media art festival, OUT OF THE INTERNET, considered artists working in or connected through internet art practice.
OUT OF THE INTERNET realized an interconnected and context-articulate exhibition presence of net-based work across a range of locations from elite museums, galleries, library networks and into a cascade of urban spaces.
The internet as a place of operation, exchange and creation for art can be understood as antithetical to established gallery-museum structures. The artists build their own exhibition space. It is a space that opens all hours but which may also simply disappear, be destroyed, updated, or moved. The artist has control of all content (subject of course to certain hosting arrangements, search-engine logics, internet governance regimes and implicit software aesthetics) and can nuance their context by way of trajectory URL links to and from other online spaces.
Artists often work under pseudonyms. Their work is freely available and is rarely dated. This has created a parallel operational space to that of the modernist art world economic system. These two streams do occasionally cross paths, though new models are consciously redrafted by internet based practices in order for them to cause renewed impact.
OUT OF THE INTERNET, the key exhibition component of the 2006 MAAP festival, engaged with a select group of artists living in Asia: *CANDY FACTORY PROJECTS (Japan), Charles LIM + Melvin PHUA (Singapore), Feng Mengbo (China), Iain Mott (Australia) and YOUNG HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (Korea).
With regard for their specific contexts of operation and exhibition their coming together in MAAP was done in a conscious refrain from an exoticisation of cyberspace (the space in-between the physical location of a computer server and retrieval monitor).
International audiences were locally exposed to work by YOUNG HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES at the Tate Modern, Iain Mott at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art (Shanghai) and LIM + PHUA at the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), while to view the entire festival audiences were invited to connect these local, offline experiences of singular works to the exhibitions’ other artworks online. This international, distributed, and parallel realization of out of the internet also culminated in a representation of all included works at the State Library of Queensland.
Other associated programs of the 2006 MAAP festival drew on the ‘out of the internet’ thematic.
Manhua Wonderlands was directed to playfully engage with and invade community and street cultural contexts of Asian-inspired popular culture. This project, involving artmaking collaborations with emerging artists and urban Asian-Australian communities was distributed through public libraries, an exhibition in a karaoke bar, a hacked or modified purikura sticker booth, and through DVD programs at bubble tea cafes.
Move on Asia, a program of 22 video works by emerging artists, utilized the internet as a communications tool to prepare and distribute a large program of video art selected by the curators of twelve art spaces from six countries in Asia.
Finally, KURO Satellites involved a series of community workshops. The first (supported by MAAP) focussed on open source software for artists working in the Philippines. Developed by Fatima Lasay, this project was intimately scaled to respond to Lasay’s observations of the successful impact of modest and direct self-organised initiatives.
Read more about MAAP 2006: OUT OF THE INTERNET on RealTime Arts
(http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue75/8200)