We=Link: Sideways | Online Version Goes Live

We=Link: Sideways

A Chronus Art Center (CAC) exhibition

November 21, 2020 – May 23, 2021

Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, BLDG.18, No. 50 Moganshan RD., Shanghai

Participating Artists：

Mike Bennett, Wafaa Bilal, CHEN Pengpeng, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Matthieu Cherubini, Paolo Cirio,  Leon Eckert, Ursula Endlicher, exonemo, Hervé Graumann, GUO Cheng, Vytas Jankauskas, Knowbotic Research, LAN, LIANG Yuhong, LIU Xing, Jonas Lund, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Kyle McDonald, Haroon Mirza, Everest Pipkin, Cornelia Sollfrank, Wolfgang Staehle, Ubermorgen, Maciej Wisniewski, XU Haomin, ZHAO Hua and ZHOU Pengan

Curated by

ZHANG Ga

Organized by 

Chronus Art Center

Online co-presentation with

CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), Ars at CERN (Geneva), Elektra (Montreal), Leonardo/ISAST, Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul), Copenhagen Contemporary (Copenhagen), Light Art Space (Berlin) and in collaboration with artport of The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York)

Special Thanks

Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council

Please hold down to scan the following QR code

to visit the online version of We=Link: Sideways,

http://we-link.chronusartcenter.org

Chronus Art Center is pleased to announce the presentation of a group exhibition titled We=Link: Sideways, featuring twenty-two works by twenty-eight artists and artist collectives, from the pioneers of net art to millennials. The works on display and online span three decades of net art practice, from arguably the first internet-era artwork of The Thing BBS in 1991to the most current production continuing to evolve as the exhibition opens.

Often referred to as the last Avant-garde of the twentieth century, the phenomenon largely dubbed as net art appearing in the early ’90swith the advent of the internet enjoyed an unrestrained flourishing period of prolific experimental, creative and critical engagement with the nascent new-media-fueled economy and its cultural and social ramifications. By 1997 the institutional acknowledgement of the once peripheral and fringe art practice along with the commodification of the internet made net art seem, according  to art historian Dieter Daniels, to have “reached a dead end or turning point.”

This exhibition takes the purported net art’s “dead end” as a new starting point to chart a discursive trajectory of the practices since then, in the many manifestations of network-based art. Instead of prescribing it acategorical definition, the exhibition attempts to uncover the variegated developments, diverse strategies, critical positions and aesthetic experiments after the crash of the dot.com bubble, amidst the prevalence of neoliberalism and cognitive capitalism, and the rise of populism and nationalism. Sidewaysreveals the continuum of the Avant-garde “nettitudes” inherent in the works of these artists.

The exhibition comprises the first artist-run Bulletin BoardSystem that preceded the ensuing popularity of social networks and various expressions of artistic strategies and critical technologies aiming to disrupt a corporate monopoly of the network infrastructure and protocols, to expose the intrinsic logics of network security and surveillance in provocative stances as well as playful innuendos, and to intercept or re-appropriate commercial or institutional modus operandi. At the same time, the experimental nature of net art has continued to develop its varying aesthetic propositions along with the new possibilities and challenges of rapidly changing technologies.

Two works under the auspices of SUNRISE / SUNSET will take over the exhibition website and several partner institutions’ websites at the liminal moments of each day by direct intervention based on local time and environmental data, revealing the intrinsic logic of locality in globality, and the disruptiveness and transformative nature of the network.

The exhibition also includes a rare collection of artifacts of early Chinese internet culture during its formative years of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The amateurish enthusiasm and self-propagated autonomy mark a striking similarity with the pioneering spirit of their predecessors.

In 1999 ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe organized an exhibition titled net_condition, foreshadowing the advent of a new epoch that would be defined by the network. The net condition has been reaffirmed, by now, as a perpetual condition, and itis a posthuman condition with the net condition as its circulatory and respiratory prerequisites. In a world that is stricken by a rampant pandemic and virulent misinformation, bankrupted by corporate rapacity; a world of tumults and crises, accelerated by artificial intelligence in the feedforward anticipation of the Kurzweilian transhuman singularity; a world of hardened passion and redemption in every way reminiscent of the fertile ground in which the Avant-garde germinated and thrived, net art, the last Avant-garde of the twentieth century, may once again at this “turning point” take up that Quixoticspirit of intrepidity and strive on, once again from the periphery and the fringe – with a little mischief, a pinch of agitation, via action, through the beautiful, and by sideways, to remake history.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extended essay to further contextualize the works and their implicit resonances with the historic tradition of net art and the Avant-garde at large.

A series of exhibition-related programs and performances will be organized during the six-month exhibition period.

We=Link: Sideways is the second edition of the We=Link program, a platform for presenting online art. It was initially conceived by Chronus ArtCenter in late February of 2020 as a response to the outbreak of the Covid-19pandemic.

In collaboration with

artport / The Whitney Museum of American Art

Special Thanks

CAFA Art Museum (Beijing)

https://www.cafamuseum.org

ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

https://zkm.de

HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel)

https://www.hek.ch

V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam)

http://v2.nl

Ars at CERN (Geneva)

https://arts.cern

Elektra (Montreal)

https://www.elektramontreal.ca

Leonardo/ISAST

https://www.leonardo.info

Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul)

https://njpac-en.ggcf.kr

Copenhagen Contemporary (Copenhagen) 

https://copenhagencontemporary.org/

Light Art Space (Berlin) 

https://lightartspace.org

artport of The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York)

https://whitney.org/artport

Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Swiss Arts Council

https://prohelvetia.cn/zh/

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Opening Talk (live streaming) 

A Conversation with Curator ZHANG Ga

Artistic Director, Chronus Art Center

Scan/save the QR code to watch the online talk.

Later Date 

On November 21st, Chronus Art Center will host a special IRL performance of Later Date in the exhibition space. Audiences are invited to join a 1v1 typing live chat with the artist behind the screen, imagining and planning their future meetings. The content of the conversation will be live-streamed online simultaneously. 

Lauren Lee McCarthy is an LA-based artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, and Co-Director of the Processing Foundation. Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as The Barbican Centre, Ars Electronica, Fotomuseum Winterthur, HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel), among others.

Visit the link below for the live streaming.

https://laterdate.net/live/index-stream.html  

新时线媒体艺术中心（CAC）成立于2013年，系国内首家致力于媒体艺术之展示、研究/创作及学术交流的非营利性艺术机构。通过展览、驻留、奖学金、讲座、工作坊及相关文献的梳理与出版，CAC为媒体艺术在全球语境中的论述、生产及传播开拓了一个多样化且富有活力的平台。CAC以批判地介入不断改变进而重塑当代经验的媒体技术来推动艺术创新及文化认知。

Established in 2013, Chronus Art Center (CAC) is China’s first nonprofit art organization dedicated to the presentation, research / creation and scholarship of media art. CAC with its exhibitions, residency-oriented fellowships, lectures and workshop programs and through its archiving and publishing initiatives, creates a multifaceted and vibrant platform for the discourse, production and dissemination of media art in a global context. CAC is positioned to advance artistic innovation and cultural awareness by critically engaging with media technologies that are transforming and reshaping contemporary experiences. 

www.chronusartcenter.org

更多展览以及艺术家信息请持续关注新时线媒体艺术中心微信公众号动态.

媒体垂询：media@chronusartcenter.org