Through the Mesh
 

Through the Mesh: Media, Borders, and Firewalls

https://www.neme.org/blog/through-the-mesh-press?fbclid=IwAR00ka2XfciBnLr-NAFK-T5NY_WtcCx-Wn9VtCwYpbpGNAB7q14N3nS292E

 
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On Friday 10 December 2021 at 7:30pm, Patrick Lichty, Wade Wallerstein, and NeMe have the pleasure to invite you to the NeMe Arts Centre, for the opening of the exhibition Through the Mesh: Media, Borders, and Firewalls.

Ever since the creation of the Pony Express by the Mongolian Khanate, communications networks are a potent source of social and political power. Marshall McLuhan foretold the “Global Village,” where losses of identity can lead to violence, where everyone becomes deeply invested in everyone else’s affairs (social media, ‘Cancel Culture,’ and so on), with artists being the advance scouts for technology. Conversely, Jean Baudrillard stated in The Transparency of Evil that the signifier becomes about everything but itself—politics becoming entertainment, sports becoming politics, advertising becoming fetish, as the nature of reality dissipates in the distributed nature of the Deleuzian control networks. The spheres of informational power crash into the biopolitical (nation state), and entire nations lift out of cyberspace like great Motherships, and platforms like Meta gesture towards scales of power equal to feudal states before them. As humanity is squeezed and stratified by the COVID pandemic, displaced by climate change, and manipulated by authoritarian games of geopolitical and informatic chess, are there any moves left for humanity, or is it in an endgame?

This exhibition will feature the work of artists who initially began to investigate the cultural space of the networks, biopolitical and informatic; who challenge or jam it.

The artworks look at electronic networks as scopophilic and performative, the asymmetric regimes of power they project, and the positive uses of “darkside” technologies. These areas of investigation open the media archeologies of the panoptic network, its modalities, and the spaces of criticism, humour and progressivism. From the era of the Cold War in which the “net” was created to assure communication, Through the Mesh: Media, Borders, and Firewalls seeks to consider the conditions of the contemporary landscape and suggest progressive strategies for the future.

The elements of the exhibition will involve interactive distributed actions for public discourse, varieties of positions in which the notion of networks, the way they are reconfiguring global power relations, and the people behind multifarious borders. It is hoped that the project, through the exhibition, lectures, and actions will create useful dialogues about how the informatic landscape holds promise and peril not only for physical/informatic ecologies but the entire humanity.

Seminar

On Saturday 11 December 2021 at 6pm, the seminar Speaking through the Mesh will further augment the exhibition with presentations by curators Patrick Lichty and Wade Wallerstein and a lecture performance by Keynote guest speaker Geert Lovink. Lichty’s presentation, “Seeing through the Mesh: Exploring the Collision of Data and the Real” is an exploration of the works in the show discussed through the lens of the politics of the digital and physical worlds as an expression of control through notions of discipline and regimentation. Wallerstein’s discussion, “Phenomenology & Protocol: Power & Paranoia in the Age of the Hyperreal,” expands on protocols, or structural layers of information, and how they create entire reality ecosystems through media and networks. The seminar will be concluded with Lovink’s presentation “Sad by Design/We are Not Sick” expanding on his ideas relating to the social effects arising from social media outlined in his book Sad by Design. Combining a diversity of text-, image-, and music-genres, the performance reflects on the encroaching sadness provoked by social media architectures. For this lecture/performance, Lovink and Lichty push for new modalities in both music and critical theory, to shake up both the dance floor and the lecture circuit.

Registration required. Registration is now full.

Contributors

Participating artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Mina Cheon, Joseph DeLappe, Vikram Divecha, Hasan Elahi, Negin Ehtesabian, Ben Grosser, Dina Karadžić, with Vedran Gligo, Michael Lorsung, Umber Majeed, Josèfa Ntjam, Nathan Shafer

Seminar speakers: Patrick Lichty, Wade Wallerstein
Lecture/performance: Geert Lovink

Curator: Patrick Lichty
Assistant curator: Wade Wallerstein
Project Coordination: Helene Black, Yiannis Colakides

Calendar

  • Exhibition opening: 19:30, Friday 10 December 2021
  • Seminar: 18:00, Saturday 11 December 2021
  • Lecture/Performance: 20:00, Saturday 11 December 2021
  • Exhibition duration: 10/12/2021 – 14/01/2022
  • Opening days/times: Tuesday-Friday, 17:30-20:30; Saturday, 10:00-13:00

Venue: NeMe Arts Centre, Corner of Ellados and Enoseos streets, 3041 Limassol, Cyprus

Covid-19

CovidPass compulsory for entry. Note that for your protection and ours, all visitors to the exhibition must wear a mask and keep spatial distancing. The number of visitors permitted in the space at any one time will be limited.

Funding

Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Medochemie, Alinea, AlphaMega

 
 
 
 
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