Watch an 'Office Space' Remix and More Unseen Works from 'The New Black' Exhibition

Eight artists question contemporary mediums and online platform-influenced behaviors in Nora O' Murchú's curated show for the 2015 Resonate Festival.

by Benoit Palop

April 22, 2015, 10:30pm

PORTALS from Sabrina Ratté on Vimeo.

Never-before-seen delights by a prolific team of digital artists including Alexander Porter, Eva Papamargariti, FIELD, Isabella Streffen, Kim Asendorf, Rick Silva, Sabrina Ratté and Sebastian Schmieg are on display as part of The New Black, a show curated by Irish new media art-focused researcher and designer Nora O' Murchú for the 2015 edition of the Resonate Festival in Belgrade, Serbia, which launched last week and continues throughout this week.

The exhibition questions not only contemporary, networked experiences but also present-day conditions in light of the new shapes and specifications required by both digital mediums and online platforms, imposed by their omnipresence, their privacy policies, and their commercial aspects. It weaves its way through the impacts caused by the numerous modern communication tools on our every day lives, looking “at the boundary of our work and social lives, and how that boundary is shifting as a result of different factors,” O’ Murchú tell The Creators Project. “The short story [created to introduce the show] touches on various aspects of this including the commodification of user data, the ubiquity of screens in our day to day lives and the changes in work that have dramatically shifted over the past decade,” she adds.

Parallel Universes, Optimized Version (Excerpt) from Sebastian Schmieg on Vimeo.

While collective sense of awareness pushes the open source community to develop parallel, more malleable, safer, and more user-friendly models, various platforms and companies use user data for manipulative commercial purposes, offering tailored online experiences to each and every one of us. These conflicts and tensions generate new behaviors, a daily dichotomy between life and work that the 8 artists chosen by O’ Murchú explore and translate into a creative way through an eclectic series of works.

“I choose artists whose practice or personal experiences would resonate with this theme and who I felt had something to comment and contribute to the discussion about the lived experience of users who are working at living at this intersection,” O’ Murchú explains. “For me the responses are thoughtful and powerful reflections on the contemporary conditions in which our lives seem to be increasingly determined by various scripts and computational processes.”

If you didn't have the chance enjoy Resonate last week, the exhibition will still be on display until Friday at the Gallery 12 New Media HUB, Belgrade. In the mean time, check out our sneak peek of some of the works in the show: