New artworks by six contemporary artists, including Amalia Ulman, David Horvitz, and Joshua Citarella, are going onto the dark web next month as part of “Time Out of Joint,” a new exhibition curated by New York-based artistic partners Eva and Franco Mattes.
The show, which is part of the online-only Yerevan Biennial, can only be accessed through a special browser.
Worried about web safety? As far as internet activities go, getting on the dark web is about as safe as surfing Amazon (perhaps even more so, many would argue). But the location is sure to scare some people—and that’s the point.
“One of the goals of this show is to bring people to a place they are not familiar with—even if it’s just one click away,” Eva and Franco Mattes tell Artnet News over email.
David Horvitz, (2020).
“If the surface internet is like Art Basel, then the dark net would be your artist-run space in a dirty basement in Bushwick—a place that’s a bit harder to find, that works mainly on word of mouth, but where you might discover something unexpected.” they say.
From now until January 2021, a new artwork by one of the six participating artists and collectives will debut on the site every two weeks. The first up is Horvitz’s , a project for which the artist is permanently deleting 500 digital photographs from his personal archive, one image at a time.
Artist Vladan Joler will introduce a map and essay based on what he calls “New Extractivism,” the process through which biodata is harvested by commercial and governmental interests.
Meanwhile, Ulman’s contribution is a video piece in which she turns herself into a model-for-hire on a crowdsourcing platform. “The result is a supposedly funny-online-challenge video, which calls into question stereotypes and beauty standards, and is so incredibly awkward,” the curators say.
Vladan Joler, (2020).
Indeed, for Franco and Eva Mattes, these projects represent the artistic potential of the dark web, an arena that exists far from the corporatized, data industrial complex that is the internet.
“Art could benefit from a less monochromatic, less centralized, less controlled, and less profit-driven environment,” the duo say. “Maybe the dark net is just a metaphor for something we are struggling to find in the artworld, an alternative.”
To visit “Time Out of Joint,” download the Tor Browser at www.torproject.org and visit http://fjroxjgxhmd2ymp2.onion.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
