Curators Statement

Tags: free access, online exhibition, web art

The online exhibition Re|Search http://researchexhibition.org/ aims to capture our prevailing impulse to search in the digital age. The Internet and its search engines form an economy where attention has become a currency and query establishes itself as the central means of exploring the world. Googling, scrolling, collecting, and sharing are now part of our daily routine. What are the effects of these activities on our personal and collective imaginations? Re|Search focuses on how artistic, literary, and cultural practices reflect on and interfere with this technological pervasiveness. How do these practices allow us to think about widespread data management, online research methods, and tools? What types of alternative actions and stories do they offer? By what means do they occupy the very place of these concerns: the Web? This exhibition is intended to evolve over time in form and content. At present, it gathers eighteen hypermedia artworks available online since the beginning of the 21st century. Ranging from 2006 to the present, the works by various artists and collectives provide an overview of our digital condition, and its resulting issues evolving over time. Re|Search requires to access the artworks through keywords characteristic of our online behaviours. Typing an infinitive verb in the search bar reveals the associated artworks.

Artists and collectives featured in the online exhibition:

baron lanteigne (CA) | framed scrolling
Damien Beyrouthy (FR) | Fuyantes
Nans Bortuzzo (CA) | After Foreclosure
Sandrine Deumier (FR) | [Play;]
Disnovation.org & Jérôme Saint-Clair (PL & FR) | Predictive Art Bot
Louise Drulhe (FR) | Critical Atlas of Internet
Foundland Collective (SY & ZA) | Baby Come Home
Isabelle Gagné & Paul Gascou-Vaillancourt & Stéphane Archambault (CA) | PRÖSPECT
Benjamin Grosser (US) | Tracing You
Amira Hanafi (EG) | We are fragmented
Jonathan Harris & Greg Hochmuth (US) | Network Effect
Institute for New Feeling (US) | The Redirectory
Philippe de Jonckheere (FR) | Désordre
Dina Kelberman (US) | I’m Google
Sam Lavigne & Tega Brain (US) | The New Organs
Albertine Meunier (FR) | My Google Search History
Taryn Simon & Aaron Swartz (US) | Image Atlas
Molly Soda (US) | mollysoda.exposed

• Archiver le Présent Curating Collective (Cédric Anderson, Gina Cortopassi, Ludovic Doutre-Guay, Marie Fraser, Bertrand Gervais, Joanne Lalonde, Laurence Perron and Lisa Tronca) is an initiative bringing together researchers from UQAM. The collective builds on the expertise developed by the Lab NT2, both a research center on hypermedia art and a technological infrastructure supporting the academic community. Our online exhibitions showcase works in a free access perspective. Such exhibitions are designed as Knowledge and Research Environments whose content can be constantly updated. Recent achievements include: hypermedia.MTL: expo + atelier interactifs, as part of the first edition of the Printemps Numérique 2015; Uchronia|What if?, presented at the HyperPavillon during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017; Attention à la marche! Mind the Gap! at the Centre de Design de l’UQAM, part of the 2018 edition of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) Conference in Montreal. archiverlepresent.org