EXHIBITION 011
SOLO/carlos katastrofsky: “2) why is it art?”
Works | lastwishes, netart for poor people, katstat, instant democratizer, 10 questions a netartist has to be aware of, loop | Curated by | _____fratha__ | Opening | 22 October 2007
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Number two out of “10 questions a net.artist has to be aware of” points out the most basic focus Carlos Katastrofsky’s work lies on in a very general way. The six works in his solo-show for TAGallery are simple text-based but conceptually strong reflections upon the conditions of beeing an artist who works with and within the online medium.
The starting point is a blogpost entitled “loop” linking to the same blogpost entitled “loop” linking to the same blogpost entitled “loop” … It continues its eternal way to the ironic approach to the identity of a Net Artist as viewed by people “outside the system”. Questions as “3) is programming art?” or “6) do you make a lot of money with your art?” are not only “found objects” in the discourse about New Media Art but also the opening of a new discourse which brings up a lot of further questions concering the reception of Net Art by the art-market and the ignorance of the traditional art-scene towards it.
An algorithm is thought to be an instruction, which constist of a finite number of rules with the aim to solve one single problem. The “Instant Democratizer” is a Do-It-yourself-instruction to create a completely democratic webpresence of governmental organisations using a Firefox extension. Apart from the fact that democracy is a concept developed by a few people an thus only can stay conceptual itself, Katastrofsky’s work can also be seen as a meta-one-rule-algorithm for the “democratisation of everything”, used by monopolised Web 2.0 companies as a sellable marketing-claim.
The youngest work presented at TAGallery which is commissioned by the platform LX 2.0 is a slightly modified version of a mailman-list. It lets the user subscribe and receive messages as usual, but only once because after posting he/she will be immediately unsubscribed. The absurdity of this one-way-act-of-communication lies within the possibilities of the communication-system itself: if nobody hears a tree fall in the forest – does it make a sound? If nobody reads the endless discussion of mailinglist for Internet culture – does it exist? And finally ending up with question “10) have you ever had sex?” …
carlos katastrofsky is the pseudonym for the Vienna-based Media Artist Michael Kargl who was born in Tyrol in 1975. He studied “Sculpture” at the University Mozarteum Salzburg with special focus in “Virtual Architecture and Cyberspace” and is now working as a professional Media Artist as well as art mediator and lecturer.
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tags: 404, absurdity, conceptual, link, loop, perspectivesWordPress | Zero | Newsfeed