[spectre] Do It With Others (DIWO) at the Dark Mountain - Exhibition Opening

[marc garrett]

Do It With Others (DIWO) at the Dark Mountain - Exhibition Opening

Press Release: December 2009

Do It With Others (DIWO)
at the Dark Mountain:
The Exhibition
http://http.uk.net

An exhibition resulting from a Mail-Art project across physical and 
digital networks, responding to the Dark Mountain Manifesto.

Private View: 7-9pm Full Moon, Wednesday 2nd December '09
Live performance at 8pm representing a central controversy
arising during the project

Gallery Open: 12-5pm, Friday-Sunday, 4th-12th December '09, 8th-30th 
January '10

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All 
around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into 
history. – Uncivilisation, The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

The Dark Mountain Project is ‘a new cultural movement for an age of 
global disruption.’ It aims to ‘question the stories that underpin our 
failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write 
clearly and honestly about our true place in the world.’ Do It With 
Others (DIWO) at the Dark Mountain, a mail-art project at HTTP Gallery, 
is a cultural collaboration for this age. “Uncivilisation,” the Dark 
Mountain Manifesto, calls for a cultural response to our current 
predicament. Its challenge was offered to network-minded artists, 
technologists, writers and activists as a provocation – to work together 
to re-envision the narratives and infrastructures that govern our 
relationships with the natural world, and how they might be unravelled 
and rewoven to reconfigure our place in it. As “Uncivilisation” 
concludes, ‘the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the 
world full stop.’

Artists, technologists, writers, activists and all other living beings 
were invited to correspond with each other across physical and digital 
mail networks, and the exhibition at HTTP present the results of this 
process. These have been gathered and the presentation devised during an 
Open Curation event, involving collaborators in real and virtual space. 
Transmissions to be shown in the exhibition include collaborative 
image-threads, net artworks, digital videos, drawings, paintings on wall 
and paper, sound works, and the full text of the discussion generated on 
the NetBehaviour list presented in numerous forms. The opening will also 
feature a performance representing a central controversy arising during 
the project. The exhibition offers new myths and maps for future 
uncivilisation at HTTP Gallery.

This is the second Do It With Others (DIWO) E-Mail-Art project initiated 
by Furtherfield.org. The first DIWO experiment in 2007 extended the 
Do-It-Yourself ethos of early net art, characterised by curiosity, 
activism and precision, towards a more collaborative approach, using the 
Internet as an experimental artistic medium and distribution system to 
foment grass-roots creativity.

Do It With Others at the Dark Mountain is a collaborative project by 
Furtherfield.org and The Dark Mountain Project.

More about The Dark Mountain Project and Furtherfield.org

The Dark Mountain Project is curated by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald 
Hine. http://www.dark-mountain.net

Paul is the author of One No, Many Yeses and Real England. He was deputy 
editor of The Ecologist between 1999 and 2001. His first poetry 
collection, Kidland, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. 
http://www.paulkingsnorth.net

Dougald writes the blog “Changing the World (and other excuses for not 
getting a proper job).” He is a former BBC journalist and co-founder of 
the School of Everything, and has written for and edited various online 
and offline magazines. http://www.dougald.co.uk

This project is part of Furtherfield.org's three-year Media Art 
Ecologies programme, which aims to provide opportunities for critical 
debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media art 
practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they 
engage. HTTP Gallery is Furtherfield.org’s dedicated space for media 
art. Furtherfield.org provides platforms for creating, viewing, 
discussing and learning about experimental practices in art and 
technology. Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery are supported by Arts 
Council England, London.

For details about the project, visit:
http://http.uk.net/diwodarkmountain

For more information contact:
Ale Scapin, HTTP Gallery
ale at furtherfield.org

HTTP Gallery
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre,
71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY.
http://www.http.uk.net
http://www.furtherfield.org