“[T]he screens that now people our lives.” The phrase, from the opening line of Deep Screen‘s press release, that ran at Parc Saint Léger from March 14 to 24, is telling; though McLuhan perfectly predicted the repercussions of this kind of technological shift on society, it does not cease to amaze. And while the ripple effects are vast and transformative to every aspect of ‘civilized’ life (this should always be in quotation marks), each particular industry is affected in its our peculiar way. The art world, for what its worth, has weathered the transformation in stride, taking its viewership and its platform from the stark white walls of museums directly to the screen on which you read your daily mail. The future is lazy, people.
“Since the border between the real and the virtual is increasingly porous, many artists today consider the internet, with its cycles, networks, fluids, pollution, folklore, and beliefs, as their new natural milieu,” write Camille Le Houezec and Jocelyn Villemont of the curatorial platform It’s Our Playground, in their press release. “In this ecosystem, the majority of the artworks move about freely, unconstrained by lighting or how they are positioned on display, dehierarchized, “liked,” shared, occasionally imitated, and living out an uninhabited existence in their documented form.”
Borrowing a “display-case exhibit form” from traditional art institutions, Le Houezec and Villemont invited 13 artists and artist duos working on the “post-internet” realm— including Cory Arcangel, Renaud Jerez, Rachel de Joode, Marlie Mul, and Tilman Hornig—for an encased exhibition that is nonetheless “completely of the physical world”—or, as they call it: “a view of art in 2015 through a glass screen”. **
