Online Art Commissions, 2005/6
Commissions & Prizes
As part of Metamute's relaunch, we have started a project of online art commissions funded by Arts Council London, the first of which is Out-of-Sync's The Fourth Floor. Over the next year, curators Timothy Murray and Diana McCarty will introduce and contextualise a further three more, so keep an eye out. It is our hope that these works and the contextualistions provided will form a useful starting point for further discussion...
From the Arts Council application:
In this, the tenth anniversary year of its mother project Mute, Metamute seeks to bring together disparate strands of art discourse we have developed over the years, and consolidate these in the form of two projects of curation and contextualisation. These are a programme of four net art commissions, and a collaborative book review library - both available on Metamute.
With digital creativity being the malleable phrase du jour, and forms of cultural and symbolic labour being deployed in ever more contradictory realms of life, we hope to use this opportunity to make an overview of the fast-splintering area of new media art and reassess what it might be, which histories might animate and illuminate it, and how it might be critiqued. We will focus on such persistent issues as ‘dematerialisation’ and the diffusion of the artwork; the relation of artist to audience, and art to institution, corporation and state; as well as the influence of globalisation on questions of identity and representation.
In doing so, our projects make a contemplative return to the question Mute asked in its 1994 pilot issue: 'Can art survive the 20th century?' ‘Innovative’ art is becoming ever harder to distinguish from activism, social work, philosophy, software, design, and architecture, meaning our question sounds neither as hyperbolic nor as rhetorical as it did ten years ago. Our revisitation of it will be informed by concurrent work on editorial project White Cube, Blue Sky [now Proud to be Flesh: a Mute Anthology on Network Cultures], Mute's Arts Council-funded book on historical and contemporary forms of information-oriented art.
Commissions:
Title: The Fourth Floor :: Le Quatrième étage
Author: Out-of-Sync
Date: 2005
http://www.metamute.org/out-of-sync
