The web pavilion was created around the idea of reinterpreting art in the context of distribution services. The exhibition was hosted on a website that brought together projects created by artists from four countries. The site functioned as a hub, while the art projects served as portals designed to explore the performative potential of the Internet.
One of the key features of the website was the subscription service that allowed users to receive art projects directly in their email inbox. This curatorial approach aimed to challenge the spatial dimension of traditional digital exhibitions and highlight the temporal perspective of art’s existence in the digital environment.
The idea of using an inbox for art distribution and community building traces back to the early days of the Internet, when users gathered around mailing lists dedicated to specific areas of knowledge or interest. While in the early Internet era, mailing lists were a way to navigate the web’s dispersed structure, today this format has become a means of bypassing major platforms that subject artists and users to the need to pay subscriptions, buy advertising, and generally apply market logic to the digital existence of art.
The distributed network of storing and sharing art proposed by the curators also underscores the tension between personal and collective experience, characteristic of the personal experience of being online — from websites and digital platforms to the intimate spaces of messengers and email inboxes.
The featured artworks explored the affective intensity and modes of digital aesthetics — from the poor image to file mobility. In line with the exhibition’s theme, many works examined how art can incorporate the logic of services: Can artificial intelligence be used to stop disinformation? Can sound art be considered in the context of psychotherapy? Can messengers become an alternative form of storytelling, enabling unique temporalities?
Within the exhibition, the authors sought to emphasize the transient and distributed nature of digital phenomena, utilizing modes of spatially and temporally dispersed exposition.
Domain link to the pavilion: ununsubscribe.com
No longer active since August 2024.
Artists:
AXNHER, Elizaveta Berkutova, crsrcrsr, iBiom, Polina Kartvelishvili, Daria Ivans (kookooshka) and Alexander Kovalev, Alireza Mohammadi, Ivan Netkachev, Nawin Nuthong, Xenia Obukhovskaya, Nika Peshekhonova, Sasha Puchkova, Anna Shustikova, Wasawat Somno, Anna Soz, Vorozheya Art Group, Vova Unanyan, Polina Zinziver, 130.pdf
