Content | Form | Im-material — Five Years of http://CONT3XT.NET/: Book Launch with an introduction by Tom Waibel :: September 15, 2011; 7:00 - 10:00 pm :: Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Herrengasse 13, Vienna, Austria

Why is it still easier to get an entire museum collection on the Internet than to get a single work of Internet-based Art in a museum space? As with the nature of this question, both aspects have to be taken into account: the field of Internet-based Art with its characteristics and proponents, as well as the mechanisms that allow institutions to filter what the public at large understands to be art. The book Content | Form | Im-material analyses how artistic creation on — and based upon - the Internet and the processes of its re-formulation in the real space can be developed in order to find appropriate presentational modes, suitable for both sides - the Internet and the art world — in favour of interdisciplinary discourse. It also represents a synopsis of the activities of the art collective CONT3XT.NET over the past five years, since it was founded in Vienna in early 2006 by Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl, Birgit Rinagl and Franz Thalmair.

Programmatically, this group of artists, curators and authors — their different roles and functions sometimes regarded strictly, sometimes as a fluid continuum — work at the basis of contemporary visual, textual and networked practices. Always starting from the idea of the context as the most indecisive and variable but relevant constraint of any situation, the collective analyses the spatial, temporal, discursive as well as the institutional framework that conceptual artistic practices are rooted in today. Here the main point of interest is the exploration of creative territories shifting between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ as well as between the dimensions of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the field of art. This book can be read as a loose documentation of projects as well as a screenshot of tendencies that have emerged and disappeared within the past few years. Anyhow, it is a protocol of workflows concerned with matters of content, form and im-material.

Bibliographic information: CONT3XT.NET - Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl, Birgit Rinagl, Franz Thalmair (eds.): “Content | Form | Im-material”, Verlag fuer moderne Kunst Nuernberg, 2011, 21 x 14,8 cm, approx. 100 coloured images, 264 pages, ISBN 978-3-86984-187-8, with an introductory essay by Steve Dietz

Graphic design: Benedikt Skorpik, http://thisisme.at/

Authors: Josephine Bosma, Mary-Anne Breeze - aka netwurker, Sarah Cook, Thomas Dreher, Constant Dullaart, Mark E. Grimm, Jeremy Hight, Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl, Jan Robert Leegte, Mia Makela, Peter Moertenboeck and Helge Mooshammer, Stefan Nowotny, Les Liens Invisibles, Birgit Rinagl, Franz Thalmair, Pall Thayer, Marius Watz.

Artists: Maria Anwander, Anna Artaker, Ruben Aubrecht, Miriam Bajtala, Ryan Barone, Mary-Anne Breeze - aka netwurker, Charles Broskoski, Codemanipulator®, Arend deGryuter-Helfer and Aylor Brown, Gerhard Dirmoser, Aleksandra Domanovic, Reynald Drouhin, Nikolaus Gansterer, Christina Goestl, Jochen Hoeller, Karl Heinz Jeron und Valie Djordjevic, Michael Kargl, Annja Krautgasser, Miriam Laussegger and Eva Beierheimer, Jan Robert Leegte, Ralo Mayer, Michail Michailov, MTAA - M. River and T. Whid Art Associates, Barbara Musil and Karo Szmit, Joerg Piringer, Lisa Rastl, Arnold Reinthaler, Veronika Schubert, Johanna Tinzl und Stefan Flunger, UBERMORGEN.COM, Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak

FROM THE INRODUCTORY ESSAY BY STEVE DIETZ:

[...] At the heart of CONT3XT.NET’s exhibition practice are two overlapping questions: what is the possible relationship of “immaterial” (Internet) art to material space, especially the white cube of the art world, and what is the possible role of the curator in manifesting this relationship? [...]

[...] One of the central tropes of CONT3XT.NET’s exhibition-as-theory approach to curatorial practice is the idea of translation. Not translation-as-decoding, which Warren Waver famously and influentially wrote about in 1949: “When I look at an article in Russian, I say, This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.” [...]

[...] Interpretation is an inherent mode of curatorial practice, and CONT3XT.NET must decide, generally in collaboration with the artists but not entirely, how to manifest the form and content of the network recension of any works exhibited. There is not necessarily a correct answer in this process — although there may be wrong ones — but there is a kind of feedback loop between CONT3XT.NET’s interpretive mode and the content of an exhibition, which is both an instantiation of and a theory about their curatorial practice as translation. [...]

More on the book:
http://cont3xt.net/blog/?p=4750

Supported by:
Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Wien
Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz
Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck
Remaprint, Wien

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