16 Apr 2008

"Holy Fire, Art of the Digital Age", Brussels, 18-30 April

Featuring:
Cory Arcangel (USA), Gazira Babeli (SL), Boredomresearch (UK), Christophe Bruno (FR), Grégory Chatonsky (FR), Miguel Chevalier (FR), Vuk Cosic (SLO), Shane Hope (USA), Jodi (BE/NL), Lab[au] (BE), Joan Leandre (SP), Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied (RU/DE), Golan Levin (USA), Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG (IT), Alison Mealey (UK), Mark Napier (USA), Casey Reas (USA), Charles Sandison (UK/FI), Antoine Schmitt (FR), Yacine Sebti (BE), Alexei Shulgin & Aristarkh Chernyshev (RU), John F. Simon, Jr. (USA), Paul Slocum (USA), Wolfgang Staehle (USA), Eddo Stern (USA), Ubermorgen.com (AT), Carlo Zanni (IT)


iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology is proud to present Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age, a collective exhibition featuring a unique panel of digital artworks created in the last ten years by internationally known new media artists, and coming from galleries and collections from around the world. Curated by iMAL director Yves Bernard and Italian curator Domenico Quaranta, Holy Fire is, in fact, featured into the “Off Program” of Art Brussels, the international contemporary art fair (April 18 - 21, 2008). Taking its cue from this occasion, Holy Fire is an attempt to explore how new media art, bypassing all the stereotypes connected with its presumed immateriality, was able to enter the art market.

Thus, Holy Fire is probably the first exhibition to show only collectable media artworks already on the art market, in the form of traditional media (prints, videos, sculptures) or customized media objects. The exhibition wants to show that new media art is just art of this century, to contribute to reduce the gap between digital art and contemporary art, and to participate in a broader understanding and acceptance of digital media. Holy Fire comes out from the belief that talking about a “new media art” as something different and separated from the contemporary art world doesn't really make sense today. All contemporary art is, someway, new media art, as far as it makes use of the digital media for various purposes. So, the artworks collected in Holy Fire are not new media art, but simply art of our time: art which appropriates institutional or corporate identities, creates fictional ones, hacks softwares and game engines for its own purposes, infiltrates online or offline communities in order to portray them or their own myths, subverts existing tools or creates its own ones, explores the aesthetics of computation and information spaces; or, more simply, art which uses hardware and software in order to create art and speak about our time. With the accelerated technological development (e.g. large flat screens, powerful beamers, ubiquitous computing, wifi, fast internet) and the sociological and cultural acceptance of digital tools and media, new media art is going to become one of the main currents of 21th century art, looking at its own nexus to our techno-environment as a strength (not deafness), and to be part of our everyday life in our office, in public buildings as well as in our home.

The title of the exhibition is a reference to a well-known book by Bruce Sterling, a book which, among other issues, envision the art of the (at that time, future) digital age. In the same time, the issue makes reference to the passion that helps a growing number of people (artists, curators, gallery owners and collectors) to take care of an art that is temporary and variable by definition.


Galleries:

Bitforms, New York; DAM Gallery, Berlin; Fabio Paris Art Gallery, Brescia; Numeriscausa, Paris; Postmasters, New York; Project Gentili, Prato; Rodolphe Jannen Gallery, Brussels; XL Gallery, Moscow.


Collateral Events:

"Holy Fire: Exhibiting and Collecting New Media Art". Conference-debate
Saturday 19 april, 11:30 - 13:30
Art Brussels (Brussels Expo)

One of the targets of the Holy Fire exhibition (iMAL, 18-30 april) is to take a snapshot of the present situation of New Media Art, an art practice arose from the meeting of art and computer technology in the Sixties. This practice developed into a self-built, parallel art system and had a second youth in the last half of the Nineties. New Media Art has always been described as process oriented, immaterial, and therefore un-collectable and un-preservable. Now getting to its adult age, it is entering the contemporary art world and market.

Moderated by Patrick Lichty (Columbia College, Chicago) with Alexei Shulgin (RU), Olia Lialina (RU/DE), Steve Sacks (bitforms, New York), Wolf Lieser (DAM, Berlin), Stéphane Manguet (Numeriscausa, Paris), Philippe Van Cauteren (SMAK, BE), Domenico Quaranta (Brescia, I) and Yves Bernard (Brussels).