Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Heath Bunting, MTAA, Rafaël Rozendaal, Critical Art Ensemble, Lorna Mills and Ryder Ripps.

Dot.Art was an exhibition and events programme presenting artworks from the first wave of Net.Art alongside more recent projects produced since the rise of web 2.0, social networks and easily accessible search engines. Taking place in Vivid Projects’ physical space as well as occupying hyperlinks on its website, the Dot.Art season explores the internet as a medium and site for art from the 1990s through to the present day and includes an events series incorporating a weekly reading group, talks, performances and workshops.

Artists include:

Heath Bunting (UK), BorderXing Guide, 2002

Heath Bunting is an early pioneer of Net.Art. Since the 90s, his work has used networks and particularly the internet as a way to disrupt formal proceedings in the ‘real’ world. BorderXing Guide is a website documenting his work illegally moving between countries and providing notes on how others can do the same.

Critical Art Ensemble (US), Poster series, 1998-2008

Critical Art Ensemble is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations working since 1987. Their work explores the intersection of art, technology, critical theory and political activism. The exhibition will include a selection from their poster series and artist books.

Lorna Mills (Canada), Money 2, 2012

Lorna Mills is best known for her use of animated GIFs which have circulated widely since the rise of Web2.0 in the early 2000s. For Dot.Art she presents  a pair of animated GIFs from her Money 2 series, depicting a bombastic array of imagery informed by online popular culture.

MTAA (US), Simple Net Art Diagram, 1997

MTAA are a collaborative duo formed in the mid-1990s. Their work attempts to explore networks and the institutionalised art world. Simple Net Art Diagram seeks to contextualise the practices of artists who were working online at a time when galleries, curators and museums were not.

Ryder Ripps (US), Howl 2.0, 2009

Since 2010 Ryder Ripps has exhibited paintings, sculpture and other artworks which are directly informed by life online. During Dot.Art he will present a performance of his online poem Howl 2.0, described as “Ginsberg’s howl for the internet age”.

Rafaël Rozendaal (US), infinite thing.com, 2016

A Dutch artist based in New York, throughout the 2000s Rozendaal produced a large number of highly colourful and occasionally interactive websites as well as developing a system which allows collectors and museums to acquire the work whilst still allowing it to circulate freely and widely online. ‘infinite thing.com’ can be compared to an online drawing which changes every time it is opened.

Young Have Chang Heavy Industries (Korea), Notes on the Downtown Eastside (from the East Vancouver Trilogy), 2011

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries are a collaborative duo who since the early 1990s have become known for their online, text based flash animations set to jazz soundtracks. Notes on the Downtown Eastside is a Flash animation made during a residency in Vancouver but recalls many other downtown eastsides, not least Digbeth.

Events schedule:

Friday 05 May, 6-9pm | admission free
Launch Event – Ryder Ripps presents Howl 2.0, a re-imagining of Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem for the internet age. Part of Digbeth First Friday.

Wednesday 17 May, 7pm | admission free

Ryan Hughes Curator’s Tour (part of Museums at Night)

Friday 19 May , 6.30pm

Heath Bunting Artist Talk (part of Museums at Night)

Heath Bunting discusses his work BorderXing Guide and his wider practice. BorderXing Guide includes walks that traverse national boundaries, without interruption from customs, immigration, or border police and comments on the ways in which movement between borders is restricted by governments and associated bureaucracies.

Reading Group:

As a part of Dot.Art there will be an informal reading and discussion group on Thursday evenings. This reading group is free to attend for members of Black Hole Club, Extra Special People and the Office for Art, Design and Technology Professional Development Cohort.

Thursday 11 May , 6.30pm Critical Art Ensemble’s Slacker Luddites. A discussion exploring our relationships with technologies in the workplace.

Thursday 18 May, 6.30pm Janet Vaughan Are Theatre-Makers Natural Net Artists?

Vaughan’s essay on the similarities between the stage and the browser explores how both theatre and internet art are founded on person to person communication and how it could be argued that both are multidimensional fictive contexts where truths and realities are played with, questioned and blurred. 

Thursday 25 May, 6.30pm  Mike Phillips and Geoff Cox’s essay, Donald Rodney – Autoicon – The Death of an Artist,  in EMERGENT FUTURES, Art, Interactivity and New Media.

“There were no corpses in the time tombs, no dusty skeletons. The cyber-architectonic ghosts which haunted them were embalmed in the metallic codes of memory tapes, three dimensional molecular transcriptions of their living originals, stored among the dunes as a momentous act of faith, in the hope that one day the physical recreation of the coded personalities would be possible.”

(Ballard J.G.1992)

Dot.Art is produced by Ryan Hughes (Lead Artist at Office for Art, Design and Technology) in partnership with Vivid Projects.