METASCREEN: ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS, TRAVESS SMALLEY, PRISCILLA TEACuratorial text by Miltos Manetas

31st March - 18th May 2011Opening reception: Thursday 31st March, 2011 from 7pm to 9pm

Gloria Maria Gallery is pleased to announce Metascreen, a group exhibition featuring works by Andreas Angelidakis, Travess Smalley and Priscilla Tea, chosen for their emphasis on a neo-analog experimental approach.

Andreas Angelidakis is an architect who maintains an experimental practice in Athens, Greece, a studio involved in building, designing and speculating the contemporary ecosystem of screens and landscapes at the intersection of two systems: Art and Architecture, Virtual and Real, Building and Nature, Ruin and Construction. The medium Angelidakis uses is always some type of inhabitation, of buildings and spaces. These take the form of videos, computer animation, 3D prints and actual functional space. In recent years he has designed online communities, exhibition spaces (Athens Biennal, MUSAC, Fargfabriken), while writing, blogging and teaching.

Travess Smalley is a New York CIty-based artist whose work playfully explores confusion in digital visual mediums. His practice centers around the creation of digital images through an evolving process that often includes non-digital steps, such as drawing, scanning, collage, and printmaking.  His gif works are looping animations that repurpose the internet-based animated image as an object of formal contemplation, referencing the non-narrative psychedelic films and videos of the 1960s and 70s. Smalley is part of the internet collectives Loshadka, Computers Club, and Supercentral. He also founded the experimental design project Poster Company with Max Pitegoff in 2009. 

Priscilla Tea is a young painter who lives and works in Milan. Her large scale canvases are often a collision between digital gestures and painterly gestures, but generally speaking, her concern is with the idea of painting-after-internet. Priscilla is focusing her work on a painting practice premised on layers, performativity and innovations which were native to the computer screen, where each individual painting is functioning as a piece of research, and in this constant enquiry there is a neo-analogical development.

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Metascreen

Though most people are obediently aligning themselves with the illuminated dictatorship of digital, a few of us have decided to reset our watches and go slightly analog instead. To go fully analog would be impossible, as it would require us to drop away from our Global Description of Reality, (GDR), which is based entirely on being digitalized. Digitalization began a few thousand years ago, with categorization and naming, and it went mainstream with the use of the written word.

Digital's roots are based upon a very simple instruction:

"This is a door"

 "Yes" (1) versus "No" (0)

Accepting this instruction requires us to choose between 0 and 1, and then passing that "knowledge"' around. Whether this knowledge was delivered by God, discovered by human genius, or simply appeared at the head of a long string of possibilities, the instruction is taken very seriously, and for a very long time. In our time, the instruction has become such dogma that if we try calling things by strange names, or calling them names of other things, we are either crazy or speaking metaphorically. Or, maybe, we are doing “art”. As it happened, art hacked a place for itself upon our need to be reminded of the relativity of all these definitions. We need art; now, more than ever, with all of these computers and networks around, and with Big Digital closing in on us from all fronts. We need to look at digital and see what else it is, because if Digital is left to the sterile application of categorization and naming, this guarantees a very miserable future for all of us.

Priscilla Tea, a young Italian painter based in Milan said: “The aesthetics of the Net are not reaching us through the subject of the artwork any more, but through the method that we use to create the work.” She is referring to certain artists that belong to the generation before hers, those that got into the pains of depicting the landscape of the computer screen. I am one of those artists. My friends and I made paintings where, instead of an apple or a guitar, we depicted a website, a Skype window, or something clearly made with Photoshop.

Priscilla Tea's paintings do not look like that. Still, somehow, they feel ‘computer’. To make her paintings, she first draws patterns on her laptop. She spends a lot of time in preparation of these patterns, which she sometimes extracts from photographs, and at other times draws from scratch absentmindedly. Then she lets those patterns evolve, inside and outside her Macbook.

Sometimes, for example, she will ask a computer program to drip paint to form a pattern, but before she draws it on to her canvas, she will turn it ninety degrees. It is a simple thing to do really, but our brain recognizes such modifications as aesthetic calculations, which are, by tradition, analogue.

Finally, our brain reads the final object, not as a digital instruction--scandalous / fun / interesting / boring / already done--but as a piece of Metascreen, an analogue marvel.

By using the term Metascreen, we refer to both a time without all of these screens littering our lives, but also material that contains mental tags, referencing the landscape of the computer screen. Speaking of such mental tags, I can very well imagine Travess Smalley surfing the net and, impatiently, looking for these tags. What he finds, he collects with the same passion of a young Jannis Kounellis who finds and carries an abandoned train rail to his studio, and spends weeks looking at it. Travess is not very fascinated by the possibilities of the different new media that are thriving these days on the internet. Like Kounellis in his day, he is mostly eager to pinpoint his personal position in this state of affairs. For Travess belongs to the "second wave." generation of Internet artists, those who see themselves more “artists” and less “internet” than the militant network vanguard that started operating in the early 2000. That network includes artists as Rafaël Rozendaal, Angelo Plessas, Harm van den Dorpel and Nikola Tosic. These artists, either openly, such as Rozendaal, who even tattooed the word Internet inside his own mouth, or hiding and trying to behave like normal artists, such as Van den Dorpel, have always been on the side of the Internet.

Now, if we start looking at the data, and ignoring the personal reasons for which people do things, we realize that this retro-move of attention is nothing but the behavior of information itself. Information wants to mostly be copied and in order to do so, it has no problems passing through more traditional channels, such as education. It is not coincidental that most of the artists of the Second Wave went to art school, regularly read art magazines and seem to know a lot about recent art history. The artists of the First Wave, if they had any knowledge at all about art history, it was knowledge acquired only after the artist already went through his or her formation. For

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that first generation, art knowledge simply did not interfere with the work, and they looked at the Internet mostly as an environment, and less as a tool.

Going back to screens and Metascreen now, these screens are a burden. The last time that I counted, I realized that I am carrying fourteen of these screens in my suitcase, while at my home or in the hotel, there are many more waiting for me. In an ideal world, the move away from screen to Metascreen would be the passage from the nightmare of all those computer screens to the very interesting place of Existential Computing. Existential Computing is a kind of computer "reality", but has nothing to do with virtual reality, augmented reality, and the like. How would this computer reality look? I have no idea of course. If I did, Existential Computing would be already here, because knowing the aspect of something is inventing it. Still, we can start by imagining how this possible future will look by thinking of what would be different if the three requests of The Father of the Internet, Mr. Leonard Kleinrock, (the man who send the first email in 1969), were satisfied.

These requests are the following:

1. We need to be able to access the Net from any place. (Even from the center of the Earth, or from the most remote corner of the universe).

2. We need to be able to connect by using any device (with a fork for example, or with an old shoe).

3. The device that we will be using to connect should be invisible. Kleinrock's "Metascreen" is the utopia of an era where the database has finally become just another layer of nature. Dr. Kleinrock, after all invented the Internet just because he was fascinated by Supeman's powerful radio. (Six-year-old Leonard Kleinrock was reading a Superman comic at his apartment in Manhattan, when, in the centerfold, he found plans for building a crystal radio. He built that radio and was totally hooked when free music came through the earphones: no batteries, no power, all free. Later, in another issue of Superman, Kleinrock read about another radio that could emit its signal from anywhere in the galaxy and he decided that this was the radio that he wanted instead!)

We are probably still very far, (or maybe not too far), from that era but I believe that the trick here is to now start thinking analogue again. I am not talking about the old pre-Internet analogue, but of the coming one, of analogue after digital.

What is not exactly self-evident through art becomes clear when we look at certain architecture. For example, in the works of Greek-Norwegian architect Andreas Angelidakis we already feel the space of the Metascreen. Architecture differs from art essentially because of the fact that it has always been more analogue than digital, because once it is inhabited, it ‘becomes’, instead of remaining always on the state of ’being’. (A work of art remains in such a state of ‘being’ even when it is interactive). Angelidakis builds ruins, and he has done so for many years now, starting with the creation of the Neen world in the year 2000. But these are not the ruins that Piranesi was depicting as the surroundings of the Rome of his time; these ruins are coming from the future, not from the past. They are the ruins of Digital.

To use the words of Priscilla Tea, speaking about her own works and those of other Metascreen artists: “Instead of bringing an echo of nature to the digital unreality by using mostly digital tools, we are now carrying the very echo of digital into so-called reality. Reality is here to stay, even if we will augment it.”

Metascreen between other things, is the cry of digital that is soon to become both history and past.

Miltos Manetas, Bogota, 2011

Images credits, from left to right clockwise:- Andreas Angelidakis, Moonlight, 2011, still form video- Travess Smalley, PoolGif.com, 2009, still from website- Priscilla Tea, CRESTONDRIVE/BIANCAMARIA, Untitled (pool), acrylic and paste on canvas, 200x309cm

For further informations please contact: Gloria Maria Gallery via Watt 32 Milan T +39 02 8708 854 pr@gloriamariagallery.com

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