In 2019 Vivid Projects announced Bcc: an international group exhibition co-presented by Decoy Magazine (Vancouver) and Vivid Projects (Birmingham). 

The exhibition drew from Decoy Magazine’s unique email subscription programme, which commissioned new work by digital artists around the world from 2016 to 2019. The programme used a collective patronage model and endeavoured to protect the rights of artists through an informed, sustainable, and contractual sharing platform. The exhibition at Vivid Projects featured an archive of digital works from 19 Bcc: commissioned artists, representing a diverse group of contemporary, international, emerging, and established digital artists whose works contended with the limitations and opportunities of alternative distribution channels.

Bcc: dealt with the transformation of media distribution ethics and the conventions around our perception and understanding of the artwork as an object. The affordances of any artwork—its medium, size, price, genre—determine how it is exhibited, distributed, stored, commissioned, and archived. Bcc: was a call to reflect on how everyday and allegedly private networks delimit privacy, through the free circulation of small files and artworks in particular—and how the mode of delivery regulates and shapes the capacities of an artwork. We wanted to further challenge these ideas by bringing artworks designed for online circulation into a physical exhibition space, in order to expand the works’ potential audience from a private screen to a shared public space. Through this exhibition, we considered the complex challenges of distributing digital artwork while acknowledging its insistent materiality and physicality.

Participating artists: Jeremy Bailey (Canada), Scott Benesiinaabandan (Canada), Renick Bell (Japan), Anthony Discenza (USA), Santa France (Latvia), Donato Mancini (Canada), Olivia McGilchrist (Jamaica), Lorna Mills (Canada), Jonathan Monaghan (USA), Nick Montfort (USA), Sabrina Ratté (Canada), Antonio Roberts (UK), Claudia Salamanca (Colombia), Nicolas Sassoon (Canada), Ieva Saudargaitė Douaihi (Lebanon), Sydney Southam (Canada), Alexandra Spence (Australia), Rodell Warner (Trinidad & Tobago), Xuan Ye (Canada)

Curated by Lauren Marsden for Decoy and produced by Antonio Roberts for Vivid Projects.