PAST EXHIBITION
PROXY MUND
(+dis-)embodiment is an exhibition by techno-feminist collaboration Proxy Mund that play
with ideas of hegemony,
self-optimisation and work culture. The duo present over 70 images of 3D scanned hands which pop
up in a sequence of random loops,
each picture dotted across the screen in varying sizes and orders with every refresh. This is
the first show by External Pages, an
online exhibition space that focuses to develop a new wave of net art relating to
post-capitalist and xenofeminist thought.
Often applied as a reference to agency and free will, the representation of hands in this
exhibition instead looks at how they are
vehicles of compulsory production, and function as elements that define labour in both
productive and reproductive (such as
self-optimising) work. With the idea of physicality wanting to achieve “non-physicality” —
fingers working to create virtual content
or bodies enhancing to attain happiness — Poxy Mund explore the possibility of defining our
anatomies beyond biological borders.
Using 2D screenshots of 3D scans, the pictured arms have a deceivingly interactive aesthetic to
them and an audio track
automatically plays on loop in the background, teasing the viewer with negligible command over
what is happening on the webpage.
(+dis-)embodiment applies this lack of power for the user to further question the agency
involved in self-reinvention and the
consequences of our online identities.
While Proxy Mund’s hands are here viewed as connectors between identity and its surrounding
environment, we are introduced to "the
lie of disembodied cyberspace" (C. Kraus, I Love Dick, 1997) and how the tangible and intangible
operate as non-binary units.
Proxy Mund is an art project made up of
Eleni Odysseos and
Sofia Albina Novikoff
Unger. They examine the connections between technology and the body, reflecting
on economic, ecological and feminist discourses. Their
medium is a combination of text, sound art, video, 3D modelling & scanning, motion capture, and
sculptural objects. Based in London
and founded at the Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art course, they are from Russian, Danish and Cypriot
backgrounds.
Edited by Chris Hayes
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ACQUA VRZAL
In a translucid internet experience, Acqua Vrzal presents us
with ?/§nake/girl/?, the second show by online exhibition space, External Pages.
Currently transitioning from visual to movement, dance and performance art in Berlin, Vrzal’s
practice has largely consisted of
anonymous admin work, graphic design, and self-portraiture that she “mutilated” by editing and
collaging, published under multiple
aliases.
This is explored further in the disfigurement of computer graphics or online photography in our
first solo show with the
interdisciplinary artist. Vrzal introduces us to six main digitally-manipulated pictures that
have either been stockpiled from
google images or shot through her webcam. They float around our browser in multilayered
arrangements and twisted, gelatinous
pulsations while little visual assemblages of moths or winged “fairies” are randomly scattered,
hovering between the self-portraits
like spirit animals. Normal maps are stretched and used as background sets or core elements of a
composition while reptiles, aliens
and insects append to her photographed skin. References of eggs crop up in a variety of symbols,
poems, urls and selfies, which
oppose the incessant question of “girl or boy” with “girl or snake”.
While the page is laid out in ways that reminds us of a tumblr blog code that’s been fucked
with, the topic of the show rests on how
the artist copes with dysphoria, accumulated from her “tumblr trans teenager times”. Mixing
liquify filters and magic wand selection
tools in Photoshop with glitches and lags in CSS animation filters, ?/§nake/girl/?
marries gentle fluid movements with
distortion, and asks us what alternatives can be found in exploring the self via grainy DIY
imagery and fantasy narratives.
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GEORGINA TYSON
Fully committing to gush out her browser content in Overshare,
Georgina
Tyson collaborates with
External Pages to produce it's third exhibition of the year.
Between the 12th and 18th of June, 2018, Tyson shares the entirety of her online activity with
us, that for some would seem too
personal, to examine how we give out information that nobody asks for. Her internet history is
completely disclosed and used as a
structural basis for her video Overshare, which has been recreated as a website
experience for External Pages. The virtual
timeline demands to be scrolled through as short, private notes appear along the list of visited
URLs, which vary from social media
and online shopping services to sex work websites. Vines located next to these intimate logs
automatically play only when visible,
like reaction gifs on twitter, and alleviate her confidential entries from the contextual
soreness of topics that cover emotional
insecurity, mental health, and sex addiction.
The low-cost/brow/res multimedia artist showcased Overshare during September 7th — 13th
at Chelsea College of Art, London,
September 22nd at The Royal Standard as part of “Bye Hun!” for the School of the Damned handover
show, and October 25th at Hotel
Elephant as part of Micro Acts 4.
Georgina Tyson focuses on sex work, social class and the internet, and runs
low_res_camera_roll, an
instagram residency
account. She is currently looking at the fetishisation of food and working class culture via
personal experiences in the sex
industry and art academia.
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MACKENZIE DAVIDSON
External Pages presents its fourth exhibition titled a memory, built by Toronto-based
artist and designer
Mackenzie Davidson.
Embedded in the centre of Davidson's web-page, a round-edged frame displays a poem which loses
parts of itself every time the page
is loaded. With each successive visit to this website, the poem renders a newly fragmented text,
and the previous text is deleted
permanently. This process repeats until the full poem is completely erased, predisposing a
blankness that is collectively produced
by site visits of past internet users. By viewing the poem, the visitor automatically agrees to
participate in destroying it.
As a co-founder of the design and technology studio 4 us and 4 others (past: 56,
Temporary Studio), Davidson continues to think about the impermanent connections between people
and art — especially in digital
contexts — and how that may reflect in personal relationships in general. Their
multidisciplinary coding practice retains writing as
a foundational medium, having published their first poem in damp (archive), a group web project that requires user
interaction and object orientation to unveil texts. Davidson’s past work has been
exhibited at Ambiguous Ardour, Furthermore, and Centerfold Gallery,
where they later became a creative director and partner.
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UPDATE: a memory's poem is now entirely deleted due to a sufficient amount of
site visits.
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ANNA TOKAREVA
For its fifth exhibition External Pages collaborates with digital artist and designer
Anna Tokareva to display
BYMG™, a fictional pharmaceutical
company website.
Fade and slide animations, habitually implemented in commercial websites to reveal dramatic
background images and marketing
slideshows, are instead employed to unveil Tokareva’s graphics in BYMG™. Molecular
diagrams, schematic cell structures and
labeled bin-genome networks are mutated and modified, displaying colourful hyperreal imitations
of technical drawings. Various
illustrations appear and vanish on random mouse hover commands, while others ease in and out of
the window.
Baba Yaga Myco Glitch uses aesthetic means and promotional tactics from biotech companies that
seek to enhance their online
presence, to question their effect in producing vague company ethea and cryptic narratives. By
adapting a specific set of UI and UX
methods to increase website visibility, BYMG™ explores how such SEO processes encourage a
fabrication of ambiguous tales
around medical research institutions. Tokareva has executed this through designing BYMG’s
website as a front for the ulterior
motives of the antagonistic Baba Yaga, a character often described in Slavic folklore as a
villainous witch with equivocal
intentions.
While this project aims to expose such storytelling procedures found in SEO management, Tokareva
has faith in BYMG™. Baba
Yaga’s intentions are routed in miscellaneous alchemic experimentation with chemical reactions,
generative codes and homespun
agency. The lab’s secret objectives lie in spreading their wild yeasts and self-growing cultures
to infect its users with
hallucinogenic visions of alternative futures.
Currently based in London and working in digital project management, Anna Tokareva
(Rostov-na-Donu, 1988) explores entanglements
between technoscience and contemporary mythologies, at micro and planetary scales. Her work has
been exhibited in Auckland,
Edinburgh and Madrid. Her essay “Nooscope: The Political Myth of Planetary Scale Computation”
was recently published by the Digital
Cultures Institute in New Zealand.
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NAHEE KIM
External Pages presents it’s sixth online exhibition in collaboration with
Nahee.app’s
family programming
series, titled Daddy Residency. Built by digital artist Nahee Kim, the single-page site displays an “open call
for daddies”, where users are given the opportunity to apply for a co-parenting
experience with the artist. The residency will begin in 2025 when her planned pregnancy by
artificial insemination is expected to
start.
Using the faces of a hexagonal prism to set out the call’s content information, viewers are
guided through it’s sections via arrow
buttons. Animated reproductive cells and faintly glowing diagrams are tinted with soft hues of
pink and blue throughout Kim’s
background imagery. As we click through each paragraph, she states her conditions, expectations,
selection process and the
advantages of joining this experimental family “deployment”. She offers a stipend, her home as a
place of residence and the
priceless enlightenment of parenting experience, while requiring the applicant to be able and
willing to relocate, attend family
meetings and events, speak fluent English and Korean and be at least 30 years old by 2025.
The ongoing Nahee.app
project explores sexual desires and
relationships in coded objects. A
JavaScript
version of
Daddy Residency’s design, which maps out Kim’s entire family proposition and concept, can
be accessed when clicked on the
app’s icon at the bottom of the page.
Nahee Kim is an artist and a web developer exploring the programmability of human sexual
behavior, a former resident at
MassMOCA and
member of
Soft
Surplus and
Eobchae. Based in New York and
Seoul, she graduated from School for
Poetic Computation and now studies and teaches at Hunter College.
This show will continue as External Page’s featured exhibition until October 6th.
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MAZ MURRAY
External Pages is delighted to present Maz, which ran from the 3rd of November until the
begnning of February 2020. This
newly commissioned work represents a significant shift for the artist Maz Murray, who is working
in a web based context for the
first time to explore themes of gender identity and labour in the service industry. In contrast
to the tales of triumph that often
define much of emancipatory queer discourses in popular culture, this exhibition admits to
brittle uncertainties of bodies existing
and moving through time, as rooted in the experiences of the artist. This is the seventh
exhibition by the gallery, and as always is
accessible at any time from any browser.
The work invites visitors to click on ellipsis icons, which in turn reveal text and video. The
unfolding narrative describes a
non-linear progression of discovery through the artist’s gender identity. These interactive
elements play with the idea of a
personal journal entry, documenting a story that sits between confusion, guilt and shame.
Putting identity and work into
conversation is an intentional strategy by the artist, as they write, “this game has the
illusion of choice, you are along for the
ride - just like me!”
Inspired by genres of trauma, porn and tragedy, Maz is connected with Andrea Long Chu’s
ideas of unwanted impulses “at a time
when I’m feeling very abducted by my own desires”. With overwhelming amounts of information on
the internet perplexing our reality,
Murray instead allows the viewer to breathe by documenting the personal:
“Interrogating my need to turn these thoughts into art to be deemed valid or useful - I don’t
have time to transition otherwise -
and using it to talk about the ways trans identities can be co-opted and/or destroyed by
neoliberal capitalism.”
About the artist
Maz Murray (they/he) makes trashy and hopeful films, performances, fiction and public facing
bits n bobs. Their work is about
queerness, working class culture and sense of place. Maz is currently making some trans satire
while waiting for new episodes of
Riverdale to come out.
Previous projects include a short film “Laindon” which was recently premiered at ICA, selected
for London Short Film Festival 2019
and screened at Directions Bas 1, New Town Sounds and Mascara Film Club. They have collaborated
with Hava Carvajal on a critical
writing project The Right Lube,
and produced a tongue-in-cheek
research and performance project about compulsory heterosexuality and ethical consumption,
culminating in a
public workshop.
Maz’s video work has screened across
the UK as part of Playback Festival, at Focal Point Gallery, South London Gallery and Genesis
Cinema among others.
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LEGACY RUSSELL
BLACK MEME opens on External Pages.
The founding theorist of Glitch Feminism
explores
the contributions of blackness to
digital space in newly exhibited work. External Pages is pleased to announce their eighth
exhibition, BLACK MEME, a show
of new work by award-winning writer, curator, and artist Legacy Russell.
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The founding theorist of Glitch
Feminism, Russell’s first book of the same name will be released this coming September
2020 with
Verso Books. This exhibition further explores the concerns that have established Russell as a
leading voice in debates surrounding
the politics of the Internet.
BLACK MEME (2020) is, in the words of the artist, a “video essay” in an interactive
digital space, which explores questions
of black visual culture from 1900 to the present day. Through archival media and found footage,
Russell explores the construction,
culture and material of the “meme” and it’s relationship to blackness, black life, and black
social death.
“Memes are not neutral. The labor enacted through black meme culture raises questions about
subjectivity, personhood, and the
ever-complicated fault lines of race, class, and gender performed both on- and offline. I
want to talk about the economy and
engine of this and perhaps push further a discussion about how we can hold ourselves
accountable to how this material is
produced and circulated.”
– Legacy Russell
Situated on a 3D interactive laptop which hovers against a black background, the video begins
with the question "what is a black
meme?” typed into Blackle, a website first launched by Google in 2007 that aims to save energy
by displaying a black background.
Working backwards in time from Beyoncé’s 2016 song “Formation”, key references include Rodney
King’s 1991 beating at the hands of
the LAPD, the documentation of which came to be known as the world’s “first viral video”;
Michael Jackson’s legendary 1983 music
video “Thriller”; and the 1913 film “Lime Kiln Field Day”, celebrated as the oldest surviving
film to feature black actors. Over its
20 min 51 sec duration, through pacing, distortion and abrupt edits, Russell weaves a considered
and unexpected story of black
culture and its impact on the Internet meme as we now know it.
As an artwork, BLACK MEME posed design challenges for the online gallery, resulting in a
redesign of the website to reflect
the broader themes present in the video essay. The black background confronts widely held
assumptions about the “skin” of website
design – typically white – and creates a distinct environment for the artwork. Reflecting
debates within Net Art, the supposed
neutrality of these choices are exposed as reflecting deeper racial and political bias.
Key to every External Pages exhibition is the technical ability to deliver ambitious digital
environments. The gallery doesn’t
require exhibiting artists to have the coding skills required to develop these complex
frameworks. Instead, they provide web
development support to artists in realising these ambitious digital projects.
“It’s a vibrant time for digitally based projects, but there’s a lack of criticality in what is
being shown, how it is being
exhibited and why. As galleries and institutions rush to reimagine their programmes online, we
need to think of browsers as
seriously, and politically, as physical exhibition spaces. We can’t replace the white cube with
the white browser.”
– Ana Meisel, curator of External Pages
BLACK MEME ran from Thursday 16 April to 18 June 2020. The video essay was previously
screened by Ori Gallery
alongside
“Eulogy For A Black Mass” (2018) by Aria Dean, and at Pacific Northwest College of Art in
February 2020. Forthcoming
screenings will take place at Yale University as part of its Art and Media Project (AMP) and USC
Roski (dates to be
announced).
About the artist
Legacy Russell is a curator, writer,
and artist. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of
Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Recent curated exhibitions include Projects 110 :
Michael Armitage,
organized with Thelma Golden and The Studio Museum in Harlem at MoMA (2019); Dozie Kanu :
Function (2019); Chloë Bass :
Wayfinding (2019); Radical Reading Room (2019) at The Studio Museum in Harlem; and MOOD : Studio
Museum Artists in
Residence 2018-19 (2019) at MoMA PS1. Russell’s ongoing academic work and research focuses on
gender, performance,
digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. She is the recipient of the Thoma
Foundation 2019 Arts Writing
Award in Digital Art and a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow.
Instagram, Twitter
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RHEA DILLON
External Pages’ tenth exhibition takes the form of a questionnaire
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“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers”
– James Baldwin (1962)
“The moment you begin to paint, you begin to construct. Art has to be the quest for something.”
– Sam Gilliam (2007)
External Pages is delighted to present their tenth exhibition of a newly commissioned piece by Rhea Dillon titled Uchronia et Uchromia which runs from 8 November – 21 December 2020.
Uchronia et Uchromia is a new interactive artwork by Rhea Dillon. By taking the form of an online questionnaire, the net artwork highlights the process of being questioned in the context of the Black experience today.
This title combines ‘Uchronia’, meaning an alternate history or hypothetical time period, with François Laruelle’s ‘Uchromia’ which is “to learn to think from the point of view of Black as what infuses color, in the last instance, rather than what limits it.” There's a phonetical resonance too, as it sounds like uchronia ‘ate’ uchromia, which suggests the violence Black people are subject to as well as the ways in which Black culture is exploited.
Questionnaires are a tool used by many institutions across society such as entrance exams in education, which operate as gatekeeping mechanisms. By adopting this framework, ideas of power, control and inequality come to the fore. Referencing how her own experiences shaped the artwork, Dillon emphases that the endless supply of questions that demand existential and fugitive thinking represents “the interrogation of a Black person in our society: there are hardly ever any answers, or information.”
The interactivity of the artwork speaks to Françoise Vergès writing on the invisibility of the Black and Brown cleaners in the capitalocene: “The performing male neoliberal body has another kind of “phantom” body that enables his limitless performance.” The questionnaire acts as its own kind of limitless performance, as to experience the exhibition the viewer is required to answer questions with no indication of the quantity or duration ahead.
Once the viewer completes the questionnaire, they can download a personalised poster of (their own) fragmented language, referencing the composition of asemic and concrete poetry. A custom-made font, ‘Nemesis’, has also been produced for the piece by graphic artist and designer Effie Crompton.
The beginning of this text quotes two great practitioners. Dillon engages with other artists and thinkers throughout the questionnaire in this plight for her own questions deserving answers as well as those left unanswered in books, papers and poetry from the likes of Pope.L to Mildred Howard to Bhanu Kapil. Dillon’s questions are an inescapable confrontation between the ontology and the ontic of each individual sitter. It is not merely to get answers but to encourage discussion to grow and expand filtering into your homes as an ever present, ever aware and eye opening probe for the fundamental question: when you don't know where to begin, where do you start?
About the artist
Rhea Dillon is an artist and writer based in London. Using video, installation, images, painting and olfaction, she examines and abstracts her intrigue of the ‘rules of representation’ as a device to undermine contemporary Western culture. She is particularly interested in the self coined phrase ‘humane afrofuturism’ to describe a practice of bringing forward the humane and equality-led perspectives on how we visualise Black bodies. Her work has been exhibited at Almine Rech, London; DRABL, Paris; The British Film Institute, London; Mimosa House, London; and Sanam Archive, Accra Ghana, to name a few.
She is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London.
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CAMILA GALAZ
Hay que parar al que no quiera
que el pueblo gane esta pelea.
Hay que juntar toda la ciencia
antes que acabe la paciencia
de los millones que esperan.
Pan y justicia en la tierra.
(We must stop those who do not want
the people to win this fight.
We must bring together all of science
before the patience runs out
of the millions waiting.
Bread and justice on earth.)
‘Letanía para una computadora y para un niño que va a nacer’, Ángel Parra
(‘Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born’)
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External Pages is excited to announce the launch of REDES: bread and justice, peaches and bananas by Camila Galaz, featured on External Pages from 19 February – 31 March 2021.
REDES: bread and justice, peaches and bananas is an interactive video exhibition exploring political ideals expressed through network communication during two periods of change in Chilean history. Focusing on the impact of COVID-19 on the current Estallido Social movement, the research is displayed through the interface of Project Cybersyn, a socialist cybernetics project from the early 70s Allende period.
Audiences navigate the show via a control panel interface found on the classic Tulip chairs of the Cybersyn Opsroom. Based on a viable system model, Cybersyn aimed to level hierarchies and improve communication through computer technologies in a manner aligned with Allende’s socialist ideals. With the backdrop of the Opsroom, the work highlights the awkward evolution of network communication: demonstrators using the tools of modern social media apps that are a consequence of neoliberalism - an ideology that protesters are in fact challenging in the face of austerity.
“Redes”, translates to “networks” from Spanish. The subtitle comes from an introduction to a lecture by Fernando Flores (Minister of Economics and Finance during the Allende Government and in charge of Project Cybersyn) in which the speaker describes carrying around a book by Flores so much that it was covered in rotten peaches and bananas from the bottom of his backpack. Food shortages, hunger, and the shutting down of community soup kitchens (ollas comunas), are recurring issues in Chile. Against the spoiled peaches, “bread and justice” comes from ‘Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born’, a song created to promote Project Cybersyn: pan y justicia en la tierra (bread and justice on earth).
REDES: bread and justice, peaches and bananas
Camila Galaz, 2021
approx. 15min
Made with assistance and coding from the team at External Pages, graphic design from Effie Crompton, and CGI from Bel Docherty.
Included: messages from UK-based journalist Naomi Larsson Piñeda; audio messages, video, and Instagram posts from the team at @18.10aprueba; embedded livestream from Galería CIMA; music from Cristóbal Jofré.
The artist thanks Naomi Larsson Piñeda, the team at @18.10aprueba, Cristóbal Jofré, Galería CIMA, Eden Medina, and Baird Campbell.
About the artist
Camila Galaz is a Chilean-Australian visual artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California (Tovaangar). Working in video, text, and across digital platforms, her multimodal practice looks to understand how intimate connections to history exist through personal narratives, social media, collective memory, and cultural texts. Recent commissions include the Digital Writers’ Festival, Sister Gallery, Outback Arthouse, and West Space. She is the recipient of the 2018 M-Power Scholarship from the National Gallery of Victoria and the 2019-2021 Australia Council EMPAC New York Residency. Her current work is supported through an LA County Vibrant Cities Arts Grant.
www.camilagalaz.com
@_camilagalaz
Resources ⟴
References and research:
Are.na channel
Selected Bibliography:
Abbate, Janet. 'What and where is the Internet? (Re)defining Internet histories'. Internet Histories Vol. 1 No. 1-2 (March 2017)
Arriagada, Arturo, and Sherman, Andrés, and Valenzuela, Sebastián. 'The Social Media Basis of Youth Protest Behavior: The Case of Chile'. Journal of Communication Vol 62 Iss 2 (February 2012)
Beckett, Andy. 'Santiago Dreaming'. The Guardian 8 September 2003
Bulow, Marisa von, and Vilaça, Luiz, and Abelin, Pedro Henrique. 'Varieties of digital activist practices: students and mobilization in Chile'. Information, Communication & Society Vol. 22 No. 12 (2019)
Campbell, Baird. Personal Interview. 24 September 2020
Campbell, Baird, and Haynes, Nell. 'Before They Erase It: memory and the social media archive' Platypus The CASTAC Blog 2019
Carter, Erik. 'How Instagram became a destination for the protest movement'. NBC News 28 June 2020
Centre of Digital Culture and International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Classes & Social Movements. 'Digital activism seminar'. King's College London May 2020
Chenoweth, Erica, and Choi-Fitzpatrick, Austin, and Pressman, Jeremy, and Santos, Felipe G, and Ulfelder, Jay. 'The global pandemic has spawned new forms of activism - and they’re flourishing'. The Guardian 20 April 2020
Dennis, Michael A. 'Scientific and technical knowledge and the making of political order'. History and Technology Vol. 28 No. 4 (December 2012)
Dorfman, Ariel. 'Confronting the Pandemic in a Time of Revolt: Voices From Chile'. The Nation 6 April 2020
Eaton, George. 'Project Cybersyn: the afterlife of Chile’s socialist internet'. New Statesman August 2018
Eduardo Bonnin, Juan. 'Rethinking populist discourse from Latin America: Algorithmic Activism and the Constitution of a People in Chile'. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada Vol. 59 No. 1 (2020)
Evgeny, Morozov. 'The Planning Machine'. The New Yorker Vol. 90, Iss. 31 (October 2014)
Fablab Santiago ed. ‘The Counterculture Room’. Pavilion of Chile at the London Design Biennale 2016
Faiola, Anthony, and Mahtani, Shibani, and Wessel, Lindzi. 'Coronavirus chills protests from Chile to Hong Kong to Iraq, forcing activists to innovate'. The Washington Post 4 April 2020
Fuentes, Marcela A. 'Performance Constellations: Memory and Event in Digitally Enabled Protests in the Americas.' Text and Performance Quarterly Vol. 35 No. 1 (January 2015)
Gerbaudo, Paolo. 'Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism'. Pluto Press 2012
Joyce, Mary ed. 'Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change'. International Debate Education Association 2010
Larsson, Naomi. Personal Interview 19 November 2020
Larsson, Naomi, and McGowan, Charis. 'Chile police using Covid-19 quarantine as pretext to crush protest, activists say'. The Guardian 25 August 2020
Loeber, Katherina. 'Big Data, Algorithmic Regulation, and the History of the Cybersyn Project in Chile, 1971-1973'. Social Sciences 7, no.4:65 (April 2018)
Medina, Eden. 'Computer Memory, Collective Memory: Recovering History through Chilean Computing'. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing October-December 2005
Medina, Eden. 'Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile'. MIT Press, 2011
Medina, Eden. 'Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile '. Journal of Latin American Studies Vol. 38 Iss. 3 (August 2006)
Medina, Eden. Personal Interview. 5 November 2020
Parker, Angus. 'Coronavirus: the protests that can’t take place and what that might mean'. Geographical 2020
Poblete, Juan. 'Reviewed Works: Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile by Eden Medina '. Revista Hispanica Moderna June 2013
Rice-Aguilar, Camila. 'The COVID-19 Virtual Revolution: A New Era for Youth Activists in Chile'. Harvard Re-Vista 2020
Scherman, Andrés, and Arriagada, Arturo, and Valenzuela, Sebastián, 'Student and Environmental Protests in Chile: The Role of Social Media'. Politics Vol. 25 No. 2 (2015)
Sheikh Moussa, Lynn. 'Protests halt, but activism persists despite pandemic'. Beirut Today 8 April 2020
Valenzuela, S., Somma, N.M., Scherman, A. and Arriagada, A. 'Social media in Latin America: deepening or bridging gaps in protest participation?'. Online Information Review Vol. 40 No. 5, pp. 695-711 (2016)
18.10informa, Personal Interview. 19 September 2020
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CORY IN THE ABYSS
Yacht Metaphor: The Collected Works of @CoryInTheAbyss is a browser-based
exhibition that explores the work of artist, poet, and meme creator Jenson Leonard (b. 1990). This online showcase presents a selection of internet memes created between 2015 and 2021 under the artist’s alias, @CoryInTheAbyss. Through a custom-made website designed by the artist, the exhibition invites visitors to engage with these memes both as contemporary net art and as an unexpected educational entryway into complex social and political theory.
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While most meme artists create work that feeds off the daily news cycle and viral online trends, Leonard instead focuses on creating what he calls “evergreen” images—content that remains consistently relevant over a long period of time. Embracing the appearance of an almost absurdly high production value, @CoryInTheAbyss memes mine the visual language of mainstream news media, advertising, and mass entertainment. These carefully constructed images pit American visual culture against itself through pastiche and satire, subverting pop culture imagery that ranges from Hollywood film posters to ’90s hip-hop T-shirt aesthetics in order to address topics such as class consciousness, white liberal identity, police brutality, and the predatory nature of racial capitalism.
Co-hosted by online exhibition platform External Pages, Yacht Metaphor exhibits a selection of Leonard’s most iconic meme works, accompanied by the artist’s annotations and an extended text by artist and poet manuel arturo abreu. The website, which functions as an artwork in itself, presents an interactive underwater seascape that allows visitors the opportunity to pause their infinite scroll and explore the abyss.
In conjunction with the project, you can also view Leonard’s work on a billboard located in the Hudson Valley (~1309 U.S. Route 9, Tivoli, N.Y.), made possible by the generous support of Baltimore-based arts collaborative NoMüNoMü.
This exhibition is curated by Georgie Payne and developed by Clay Colonna.
Yacht Metaphor: The Collected Works of @CoryInTheAbyss will be featured on External Pages from April 3rd until May 14th.
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KATHERINE FRAZER
External Pages is pleased to present ∞ bouquet ∞ toss ∞ feeling, it’s just for you, an exhibition of new digital paintings by Katherine Frazer which runs from 7 June – 25 July 2021.
Frazer's exhibition explores the possibility of creating an “infinite” painting, embracing aspects unique to its digital context such as the endless scroll, and heightens this artistic question with imagery of “foreverness” as playfully suggested by the gesture of the bouquet toss. Each time a viewer visits the website, a new sequence of bouquets are generated on the screen. The bouquets are positioned randomly, as if they are being thrown, and rearranged in new ways as the viewer continues to scroll.
By transforming the bouquets into digital artifacts, Frazer is highlighting questions of time, attention and portraiture. These digital flowers will not decay, yet they will disappear once the browser session has ended. Their status as paintings is at once permanent and ephemeral. Additionally, the instantaneous gesture of the bouquet throw is held in time, bringing forward ideas of timeless commitment and boundless love. Explaining the generative nature of the digital paintings, suggestive of the propagative nature of weddings, marriage, birth, Frazer explains, “by engaging with the artwork, the audience is also involved in its creation, propagating a unique version each time.”
In English 15th century tradition, a wedding ceremony would typically end with guests ripping off parts of the bridal dress as a means to obtain good luck. As wedding attire became more expensive over time, bouquets, carried by the bride, came to replace the dress’ sacrificial role. Attendees would grab pieces of the flowers, sparing the dress from intentional damage. As a societal ritual, the bouquet toss embodies a poetic tension between hope and competition, as well as the delicacy of love, lust for fortune and the contractual nature of marriage.
Frazer’s process involves purchasing real bouquets and capturing intentionally crude 3D models using the iOS app Polycam, which are then collaged using Keynote, Apple's presentation software. Fragments of the bouquets are later generated in Javascript to create separate petals. Each painting is made up of auto-generated pieces that repeat endlessly as the webpage scrolls. Visitors are able to select from an indexed homepage to view six unique paintings, followed by a seventh piece which combines all bouquet arrangements.
Frazer’s paintings portray representations of love and associated cultural rituals, as well as touching on key themes of the history of painting through her background working with technology. Frazer's paintings are digitally-native, incorporating scrolling, slide shows and source files as viewing contexts. Having worked at Apple on the Keynote design team for 5 years, Frazer is now using the programme as a tool to splice out, collate and deconstruct her 3D scans. She also continues to use her knowledge from Ikebana training, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, in her practice, advancing in experimentation via digital graphics.
A series of seven digital paintings will be released at regular intervals throughout the exhibition, and are available to purchase on Foundation. Playing on the idea of infinity, each piece is named after an angel number with the exception of the last piece: 333, 444, 666, 777, 888, 999, ∞∞∞. The first painting will go live for auction on Monday 7 June, the opening of ∞ bouquet ∞ toss ∞ feeling, it’s just for you. The following paintings will be consecutively sold every Monday, with the final, combined painting being available for sale on Monday 19 July, the closing week of the exhibition. One third of all proceeds will be going to the funding of future exhibitions on External Pages (more info about this here).
∞ bouquet ∞ toss ∞ feeling, it’s just for you is developed by Mackenzie Davidson.
About the artist
Katherine Frazer is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
Known for her exploration of the social implications of consumer technology, her work investigates how modern memory is the product of the relay within distributed systems, both human and nonhuman. Her work has been accessioned in Rhizome’s ArtBase, featured in Foundation’s blog, Dazed Digital, PAPER Magazine, & Codame Festival, as well as commissioned by NewHive & MTV.
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DATA BLOOD
External Pages is pleased to host Data_Blood III, a digital iteration of a cyberfeminist installation from a series of collaborations by Alice Morey & Emily Mulenga who present under the alias Data_Blood. This exhibition is featured on External Pages from the 25th of September until the 25th of December 2021.
Data_Blood III’s interactive space solidifies the core messages of Data_Blood through a manifesto hidden within a rendered representation of their gallery space. As the user’s interaction with the gallery objects increases, parts of the Data_Blood manifesto are revealed. The manifesto is an unwilted interpretation of what cyberfeminism means today to Morey and Mulenga.
Having formed Data_Blood in 2019, Alice Morey (UK/DE) & Emily Mulenga (UK) met while undertaking their MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts. Data_Blood is a collaborative experience born out of the desire to harness each other’s working practices to explore the blurring line between human and machine, the physical body and its processes and feminism in the digital age. They produced two previous shows, both in 2019: Data_Blood, a site-specific installation in an apartment bathroom in Hoxton, East London, and Data_Blood 2.0: A Glitch, an installation at the Cookhouse Gallery at Chelsea College of Arts.
Alice Morey works across elements of drawing, painting, sculpture and performance that evolve into complex, ephemeral site specific installations through ritualising materials and traditional crafts. She investigates the passage of time and decay to navigate her working methods, contrasting it with pain and rejuvenation. Morey often juxtaposes natural and artificial materials depending on their entanglement to highlight an intimacy of relationships, with her performative work often starts with poetry and snippets of dialogues that help build a self led ritual practice. Morey lives in Berlin. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London and a BA in painting from the University of Brighton. She is represented by Lehmann + Silva in Porto and is the founder of an alternative collaborative art residency, Countdown Grabowsee, Berlin. Morey has exhibited internationally and has led projects at Saatchi Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Tate Britain, Kunsthaus Bethanien. Morey often works collaboratively and sees that as an integral part of her working practice. Recent solo exhibitions include; Every Breath you take curated by Linda Tovio, Hosek Contemporary, Berlin (2020), She Doesn’t Love, She Just Devours, The Ryder, London (2019). Recent group exhibitions include; This Must Be a Place curated by Sofia Lemos, Lehmann + Silva (2020), 42 Days, Print edition, Et al Press, Berlin (2020), Crosscurrents, Window Project, Tbilisi (2019).
She participated in artist residencies such as Kunsthaus Bethanien (2010), Divus, Prague (2011), Autocenter, Berlin ( 2015) FAIR, Camden Arts Centre, London (2019) VAADS Tbilisi (2019) AVA, Hong Kong (2019), Blank100 x Craveiral, São Teotónio (2021). She is part of Phaidon’s new drawing edition; Vitamin D3, Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing (2021).
Emily Mulenga is a multidisciplinary artist. Using visuals and sound that draw upon video games, cartoons and the internet, her practice explores themes of capitalism, feminism, technology and existential anxieties. Mulenga’s output reflects a ravenous consumption of media, where gloss and escapism meet humour and unease, spanning past, present and future.
Mulenga has exhibited internationally and led projects at Tate Britain and Camden Art Centre.
She holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College.
Data_Blood III's 3D models are built by Rudá Babau.
⇝ View cover art
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DAISY JONES
External Pages is pleased to announce the exhibition of a new interactive digital artwork by Daisy Jones, Blinded By Her Grace II, which runs from the 31st of January to the 31st of March.
The exhibition presents a new interactive digital artwork which expands upon a project by Jones initiated during lockdown: Blinded By Her Grace, a digital archive celebrating Black achievement and collectivity within the film industry. With this new artwork, Jones builds upon her exploration of Blackness through the lens of major Hollywood studios, offering a focused view on how Black masculinity is portrayed within popular culture. Revealing a challenging and nuanced view of representations of Black masculinity on screen, Blinded By Her Grace II (2022) draws attention to the common trope of Black comedic actors wearing dresses as a punchline.
With reference to I am Not Your Negro, a 2016 documetary based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House (1979), the artwork also depicts iconic images from Bad Boys (1995), Shaft (1971) and DMX’s Flesh of my Flesh, Blood of my Blood (1998) album cover, dramatically scattered across the webpage against a solid black screen. We also see an image of a blue orchid, the bra from Body Builder in Bra by Ajamu X (1990) and a packet of skittles in reference to Trayvon Martin’s murder. Each image operates as a discursive portal to the history of cinema, particularly in relation to depictions of Blackness. When the user clicks an image, a pop-up window emerges to share a selection of GIFs, JPEGs and texts exploring Black film criticism: a notable example quotes James Baldwin’s critique of Sidney Poitier's character in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). The interlinked pop-ups offer an essayistic approach to the subjects of Blinded By Her Grace II, collapsing research method into argument, shifting between digital image and filmic representation.
Across personal writing, theory and memes, Jones constructs a far-reaching analysis on the history of cinema, particularly how racist imagery both emerged from and fostered the potential of white supremacy. From the outset of Hollywood, major filmmakers and studios fabricated an imaginary sense of threat around Black men, crucial in the origins of the Klu Klux Klan, and today, continues to exploit Black actors and film workers whilst advancing harmful tropes and limited conception of Black life.
Related notions of Black masculinity, queer desire and tenderness are evocative, powerful and difficult for many audiences. The persevering image of a Black comedy actor in a dress speaks to these complicated issues, yet too often offer homophobic and anti-Black sterotypes. Blinded By Her Grace II calls attention to the anti-Blackness of this image, and begins the work of escaping from it.
“The man that these films present is not a man I know, or have ever known. But I have seen him on screen time and again. He is a man in a desperate situation, and out of his alarm he turns to supposedly desperate solutions. On the surface, this image may seem harmless – only having a laugh. But we know the history of Hollywood and where these images originate.”
– Daisy Jones
About the artist
Daisy Jones is a multimedia artist based in London. Her work is currently made in response to the representation of race within contemporary culture. Inspired by artists such as Samuel Fosso and Carrie Mae Weems, she aims to use deadpan humour as a tool to approach difficult subject matter.
daisy-jones.co.uk
instagram.com/daisyj_art
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CURRENT EXHIBITION
Theo Ellin Ballew
External Pages proudly presents Prestidigital *67 by Theo Ellin Ballew, a hypertext-inspired interactive poem.
A nebula of pliable content lights up the screen. Songs and prose float atop Youtube clips of urban weeds, which expand as the visitor scrolls and disperse when touched. New pages of verse break away, released via clicks on visual gateways. Splintered spirals outline the cursor’s movement through space in an effort to appoint the user to lead the piece’s creative dialogue, as poems are formed in tandem. Here, the visitor determines whether Prestidigital *67 is a video, a song, a poem, a game or a painting. But why decide?
Prestidigital *67 was built by Theo in response to their engagement with — and attempts to find the symbolic links between — hypertext methodology and the mystical cosmology of Kabbalah. Focussing on the phenomenon of “cross-referencing”, Theo’s interpretation reveals that there is a familiarity in the looping patterns of hypertext’s conceptual schematics and the multicursal narrative/logic of the sefirot geometry: an entity that is as interconnected and integrated as a network or cosmos. As Theo’s interests span poetry, religion and technology, Prestidigital *67 was influenced by both source texts and tangential texts found online.
This work is featured on External Pages from September 12 to December 12, 2023, and subsequently archived on the website.
About the artist
Theo Ellin Ballew (deepest known matronym Srebrna or Silver, b. 1993) writes fictional poetry and net.art. Whether static/page-bound or coded to move, Theo’s work always centralizes pseudo-science-fictional or future-mythic poetry, and often engages mystical practices. Only child of single parents in cities across the Southwest, Theo grew up on grown-up parties and ate Campbell’s soup for breakfast. Theo then went to an Ivy, and was shocked; then fled to a massive city in a different country, and stayed there for years; then went to another Ivy, to write. Theo now lives in New York, teaching in NYU’s ITP/IMA and directing ORAL.pub, a literary journal they founded in 2016 to host web-native poetry. More at theo.land.
Theo’s static poetry has appeared in publications like Action Spectacle, 1080 Press Magazine (240P), Everybody Press Review, Juked, 3AM, Tagvverk, Litro, Bone Bouquet, and Pif Magazine. Their net.art has been featured by The Wrong Biennale, Crawlspace.cool, screen_, Electric Literature Organization Conference, IK-Projects, Quinto Piso, Bandini Espacio Cultural, and Yeah Maybe.
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ABOUT
External Pages is an online exhibition space, presenting digital projects inspired by
anti-capitalist and xenofeminist thought.
Every other month, we showcase an artist or collective who push the potential of viewing art on
our browsers. External Pages exists
on the outskirts of the Internet, where bottom-up approaches to public art can be explored.
Our projects experiment with web coding to question the placement of internet art in galleries, cheat
curatorial hierarchies and look at how websites can be appropriated as an emancipatory technology. Encouraging the use of art practice to rethink web-based functionalities, we provide any coding assistance for the artists who have full control over how the show is curated.
CONTACT
We are always looking for artists, curators or collaborators that want to get involved. To ask
questions, talk about a project or
join External Pages, please do not hesitate to email Ana or message us
on social media – we’re on
Twitter and
Instagram.
So far, EP has received incredible
support through various means, such as: graphics by Effie Crompton, editing by
Chris Hayes and Matthew Atkinson,
and direction and web development
help from Mackenzie
Davidson.
All code: Github.
Reading channel: Are.na.
Rolling application to exhibit with us:
Google
Form.
Mindy Seu
We've been mentioned in the Cyberfeminism Index!
Link
Wil Ceniceros
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Charlie Mills, Coeval Magazine
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Melania Parzonka & Scott Wagner, INTERZINE
for REDES: bread and justice, peaches and bananas ⇝ See exhibition
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Clara Nissim, thisistomorrow
for BLACK MEME ⇝ See exhibition
Link
Ana Meisel, Cyborgology
for Baba Yaga Myco Glitch™ ⇝ See exhibition
Link