ARTIST STATEMENT

When we were invited to make an installation at the Annual Art Exhibition, they asked us for something "net-specific". Net.art, however, doesn't really belong in a gallery space (we can all agree on that). The majority of the art audience doesn't have a clue about different directions and sub-categories of network-related artworks (such as e.g. "browser art", "media art", "network art", "social art" or for that sake, the difference between a server and a harddisk. Is Macromedia's Shockwave gallery net.art? How about scanned paintings or photographs on an artist's homepage? How about a random live webcam placed in an art context? Lots of questions, few definitive answers. (For in-depth discussion about such issues, try places like Rhizome, Nettime (mailinglist), Kunstnett Norge (norwegian), or make your own search... (Warning, you'll get more than 60.000 hits!)

So, what is SEMENT? We chose to use the huge space surrounded by several closed offices w/windows to make famous net.art classics available only as "museum pieces", shown on monitors in the offices. Among those presented are m9ndfukc, jodi.org and I/O/D Webstalker. While setting up, we ran screensavers etc. on several monitors, and the general public seemed to not care or have a clue on how to decide what was "art" and what wasn't. So we decided to let a few monitors keep the screensavers to emphasize that net.art is nothing without a contextual reference. The "news room" in the corner finds current online news services and uses a cut-up technique to make new sentences. It's all a big riddle, really!

We decided to make the big room into a comfortable dark lounge where several cameras capture the audience as they move through the room. The video images are processed through virtual "cement mixers" and then projected back into the room. Some of the images are processed through patches made in the nato 0+55 software, some are pretty regular realvideo or webcam streams.

Net.art in a gallery context for a "general" audience is an impossible task without falling into all the hype traps that the computer and media industry want us to believe in. So, SEMENT is in many ways a critical statement on the state of net.art today, but the installation room is also a beautiful and ambient social space.



BACK