Is there an internet aesthetic? What does substance mean in virtual reality? What is the transition between digital and analogue? What is the relationship between constant omnipresence and mediation to anywhere? How does the role of the consumer, mediator, and creator merge?
Before visiting an exhibition, we look at installation photos or artists’ works on our smartphones, continuing and maintaining the continuous cycle of images and their contents. The reproduction of artworks and exhibitions in the digital space goes further than they could ever go with their physical presence.
The technological development of the Internet has intensified the mediation of images to an unprecedented level, where we are mediators, consumers and (re) creators of images and content. In this new process of mediation, we, the viewers, the content sharers, and the creators, become both recipients and producers in a constant circulation of images. This media-historical change has left a decisive mark on our culture, replacing the rigidity of materials with a series of flexible interactions, because of which we can understand our actions as new forms of mediation.
The exhibition will present the work of a current international art trend, an online and contemporary art community of Generation Y artists from the UK, Germany, Serbia, and Hungary, independent of geographical constraints. Strongly connected to both the material and virtual universe, Generation Y, or millennials, have grown into the world of the internet and social media, which has brought about significant changes in their perception of the world.
They work in a variety of genres, using predominantly analogue techniques, but they seek their reference network in the internet’s aesthetics, in the virtual reality that underpins their everyday existence. They plan and craft their paintings, objects, and sculptures both with digital and manual tools with detail to attention. Many of them reveal the process of creation on the surface of their works, leaving behind subtle, personal traces. Others play with the flaws in their work or create unusual parallels between images.
A new international exhibition at the Modem Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art offers an insight into the diverse, personal exploration of the Internet aesthetic through the work of twelve contemporary artists and a group of four artists, creating new images and forms that break free from the rigidity of materials, giving further space to the mediation between the real and the virtual.
Exhibiting artists: Batykó Róbert, Arno Beck, Birds of Cool (Gresa Márton, Kármán Dániel, Németh László [Laca], Radvánszki Levente), Maja Djordjevic, Hanna Sophie Dunkelberg, Oli Epp, Liam Fallon, Tim Freiwald, Christian Holze, Keresztesi Botond, Nemes Márton, Harrison Pearce, Aaron Scheer