[spectre] Eternal September group exhibition, curated by Valentina Tanni

[Aksioma]

Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, Škuc Gallery and LINK, presents:

ETERNAL SEPTEMBER 
The rise of amateur culture
Group exhibition and side programme
www.aksioma.org/eternal.september

Curator: Valentina Tanni

Škuc Gallery
Stari trg 21, Ljubljana
2 – 26 September 2014
Opening hours: TUE-SUN  12 pm – 8 pm


Opening programme on Tuesday, 2 September 2014:

6 pm at Aksioma Project Space (Komenskega 18, Ljubljana)
Screening and artist's presentation, Matthias Fritsch: The Story of Technoviking

8 pm at Škuc Gallery
Exhibition opening and curator-guided tour


Eternal September is a group exhibition that aims to explore the relationship between professional art making and the rising tide of amateur cultural movements throughout the Web, a historical event that has triggered a huge, fascinating shift in every field of culture, especially the visual one. The exhibition includes works by 15 authors and artistic groups (professionals and amateurs alike) and a series of special projects and accompanying events that will take place both offline and online.

Featuring: Anonymous (The Game Pro), Tymek Borowski & Pawel Sysiak, Mauro Ceolin, Paolo Cirio, Paul Destieu, Electroboutique, Matthias Fritsch, Colin Guillemet, David Horvitz, Maskull Lasserre, Aled Lewis, Dennis Logan (Spatula007), Valeria Mancinelli & Roberto Fassone, Mark McEvoy, Casey Pugh et al., Steve Roggenbuck, Smetnjak Collective, Helmut Smits, Phil Thompson,
Wendy Vainity (madcatlady) (*)


Side programme:

- Screening, Casey Pugh et al.: Star Wars Uncut, 20 – 29 August 2014 (venue: Aksioma Project Space)
- Street project, Paolo Cirio: Street Ghosts, 30 – 31 August 2014
- Online project, Valeria Mancinelli, Roberto Fassone: The Importance of Being Context, 2 – 26 September 2014 (www.linkcabinet.eu)
- Online project, Various Authors (edited by Valentina Tanni): The Great Wall of Memes (http://eternal-september.tumblr.com)
- Talk, Smetnjak Collective: We started a meme, which started the whole world crying, 9 September 2014 at 6 pm (venue: Škuc Gallery)
- Exhibiton tour guided by Vladimir Vidmar, 17 September 2014 at 6 pm (venue: Škuc Gallery)


 “Eternal September” is a slang expression that was coined by David Fischer in a comment sent to the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers in 1994 (“September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended.”). The sentence refers to September 1993, the year in which the major providers began offering access to all their customers. Up to that time, the network population was composed mostly of university members, a group that would get a little bit bigger every year in September when a number of freshmen would enter college and have their first net access. Every time a fresh influx of “newbies” joined a network, its community had to confront their “net illiteracy” and general lack of netiquette; their behaviour was, in fact, considered annoying and potentially dangerous for the quality of content and discussion.
After 1993, this influx of new users became permanent, and this “Eternal September” is still happening today at exponential speed. Internet access, which is now global, is constantly growing, despite the well-known “digital divide” issues. This phenomenon, which transformed from a tidal wave into an unstoppable tsunami, gave birth to an enormous cultural shift.

This “access” topic needs to be addressed in a very broad sense: the opportunity to access information, as well as that to use production tools and distribution channels. Every system previously used to managing and controlling cultural production is now experiencing a deep crisis, which is also causing the inevitable collapse of all the related business models.
The ultimate consequence of this scenario is also the most radical one: the questioning of “professionalism”, an event that has been foreseen by many observers ever since the 1970s. Gene Youngblood, for instance, wrote about it in the 1982 Siggraph catalogue: “A tool is ‘mature’ insofar as it’s easy to use, accessible to everyone, offering high quality at low cost and characterized by a pluralistic rather than singular practice, serving a multitude of values. Professionalism is an archaic model that’s fading in the twilight of the Industrial Age.”

The Eternal September exhibition also aims at highlighting another fundamental feature of the emerging cultural scenario: the speed that characterizes the production and distribution of creative content. This hectic and unstoppable circulation of ideas and digital artifacts has led many critics and journalists to use words and adjectives borrowed from biology jargon: viral contents, mind viruses, contagious media. Some also refer to a controversial scientific theory that was born in the 1970s in the context of the genetic research boom: the so-called “memetics”. This theory postulates the existence of “memes”, units of human cultural transmission analogous to genes, arguing that replication also happens in culture. In a fast and liquid environment such as the Internet, in which any content – images, sounds, texts – can be edited in real-time and fed back into the communication circuit, the metamorphic nature of any cultural product rises exponentially.
In an era like the present one, in which image production is so advanced and refined that it can be easily considered scientific matter, the amateur “look and feel” of many contemporary cultural products also seems to function as proof of authenticity, passion and enthusiasm. This attitude reminds us of what happened in the early twentieth century, when the simplicity and spontaneity of archaic and exotic artifacts was seen as an antidote to the weariness of Western culture, considered decadent and artificial. Today, the new “primitivism” coincides with the “amateur”.

This exhibition comprises a mix of artworks by professional artists and “non-professional” ones, comparing images, aesthetics and languages. A great number of contemporary artists, in fact, actively and fearlessly confront this new scenario in which the boundaries between professional art making and amateur products are increasingly blurred and intertwined. The project also aims to show how some of the aesthetic and stylistic strategies normally associated with cutting-edge contemporary art have been assimilated by popular culture that is born and happens online.
Our definition of art is once again changing radically, challenging both artists and viewers, two categories that are getting more and more unstable and interconnected. Eternal September is an attempt to acknowledge the revolution that is subverting today’s visual culture, a colorful and messy catastrophe that is rapidly wiping away all our landmarks in the artscape. This show does not offer any new certainty, though. Instead, it’s an invitation to dive in together, and start figuring things out.

THE CATALOGUE

On the occasion of the exhibition, Link Editions (the editorial branch of the Link Art Center, Brescia) and Aksioma will co-publish a catalogue of the show, featuring all the participating artists and projects, along with contributions by Valentina Tanni, Smetnjak Collective and Domenico Quaranta. Designed by Fabio Paris and edited by Domenico Quaranta, the catalogue will be available for print on demand and free download along the exhibition, which will be visually documented in the book. More: http://editions.linkartcenter.eu

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Valentina Tanni (1976, Rome, Italy) is a contemporary art critic and curator. Her research is focused on the relationship between art and new media, with particular attention to Internet culture. In 2002, she graduated in Art History from La Sapienza University in Rome with a master’s thesis on net art (Net Art.1994–2001), and in the following years she published a great number of articles, reviews and essays about new media art, web culture and contemporary art in general. She is the founder of Random Magazine, one of the first web columns entirely dedicated to net art (that also gave birth to a book in 2011, Random, Link Editions), and she is the co-founder of Exibart and Artribune, two important Italian art magazines. She also directed the online version of the magazine FMR (FMR Online).
She curated the Net section of the art show Media Connection (Rome and Milan, 2001), the exhibitions Netizens (Rome, 2002), L’oading. Genetically Modified Videogames (Syracuse, 2003), Maps and Legends. When Photography Met the Web (Rome, 2010), Datascapes (Rome, 2011), Hit the Crowd. Photography in the Age of Crowdsourcing (Rome, 2012), Nothing to See Here (Milan, 2013) and numerous solo shows. She also collaborates with many digital arts festivals and she’s been one of the guest curators of FotoGrafia. International Photography Festival in Rome from 2010 to 2012. She has written articles for Italian and international magazines and she works as a teacher and lecturer for universities and private institutions. 
www.valentinatanni.com 


Production: Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2014 / www.aksioma.org
Coproduction: Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana / www.galerija.skuc-drustvo.si
Partner: LINK Center for the Arts of the Information Age, Brescia / www.linkartcenter.eu

Curator: Valentina Tanni
Artistic directors: Janez Janša (Aksioma Institute), Vladimir Vidmar (Škuc Gallery)
Advisor: Domenico Quaranta
Producers: Marcela Okretič, Joško Pajer
Executive producer: Sonja Grdina
Assistant: Boris Beja
Technicians: Atila Boštjančič, Valter Udovičić
Public relations: Mojca Zupanič
Documentation: Adriana Aleksić


Eternal September is realized in the framework of Masters & Servers, a joint project by Aksioma (SI), Drugo more (HR), AND (UK), Link Art Center (IT) and d-i-n-a / The Influencers (ES).

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.


Supported by: Creative Europe Culture, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana, Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Slovenia and Institut français de Slovénie

Thanks to: Ultrasonic audio technologies


* DISCLAIMER: Every effort has been made by the galleries and the curator to get in contact with all the authors of the works in the show. Nonetheless, due to the particular nature of the project, in some cases, we have not been able to trace the source, or we attempted to get in touch but got no response. We invite everyone who recognizes his/her work and wants to be credited, to contact us at aksioma at aksioma.org. The nature of the project is non-commercial and the works in the show are not for sale.


Contact:
Marcela Okretič, 041 250 830, marcela at aksioma.org
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Neubergerjeva 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
www.aksioma.org