TAG TIES & AFFECTIVE SPIES
a critical approach on the social media of our times
18 March - 31 August 2009
The social web, commonly known as web 2.0, resembles a mixture of promises and contradictions that refer directly to its main components, those of sociality and participation. In the new public spaces of the contemporary info-sphere such as those of the YouTube, the Facebook or the flickr, people meet, interact and inter-define themselves while they are producing and consuming, they are spying and being spied . Through uploading photos, videos and posts and through tagging and linking, the users share beliefs and experiences, they construct different sides of their subjectivity and they also form the content and the structure of web itself. The era of subjective taxonomies, known as folksonomies, brings about a new situation composed by elements that are changeable, interconnected and rhizomatic.; personified, exposed and therefore easy to become exploitable.
Tag ties & affective spies presents a selection of online works that refer to the aspects and features of the social web , to the elements that render it powerful and vulnerable at the same time. Exploring the functioning modes of the social networks and the ways users interact within them, a new form of artistic practice is being formed that comments, critisizes and subverts their structures by altering their semiology and formalism. Posing questions, and approaching the social media in a playful way, the works presented aim to raise awareness about the different possibilities that are now opened up to the users.
Participating artists: Christophe Bruno, Gregory Chatonsky, Paolo Cirio, Wayne Clements, Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar, Jodi, Les Liens Invisibles, Personal Cinema & the Erasers, Ramsay Stirling, George Holsheimer - Mirjam ter Linden - Daan Odijk -Patri Sadiqah & Raoul Siepers
Organised by: National Museum of Contemporary Art
Curated by: Daphne Dragona