Curated by Iain Ball, Emily Jones and Ben Vickers
LIMAZULU project space, London

Press Release / PDF:

With the rapid rise of the prosumer, we have collectively witnessed a paradigm shift to the entertainment industry, activating a transformation for the way in which we consume all forms of media. The notion of analogue interaction with television and old
media being relegated to an absurd -and relatively short- period in our recent history.

With  the ease of production and distribution being reduced to a few clicks of the mouse, media outlets have shifted their role to the mere gatekeepers of content, that as audience and producers we so readily provide.

We now experience a seemingly infinite wealth of visual stimulation, even in a state of accelerated consumption, we are incapable of imagining its totality. As a natural reflex to the vastness of this information, we see the emergence of a new age of tribalism. Throughout the virtual expanse of cyberspace, we chance upon and participate within, enclaves of specialism, executed through the immaterial labor of amateur producers globally. From the cancerous memetic assembly line of 4chan to the totalitarian city of Magnasanti created by Vincent Ocasla, we experience a stream of creation that goes beyond the term 'outsider digital arts'.

Throughout these communities, even as outsiders stepping inside their walled gardens, we begin to identify unique colloquialisms and subtle glimpses of hierarchies within individual groups.  Governed by disparate qualities, ranging from the number of posts made to a particular message board to the closed positive feedback loops of peer group interaction.

We attempt to decipher the abstract communication that has evolved in each bubble, with the rationalism of our own tribal language, like a cultural tourist or new world anthropologist we can only begin to digest the forms we unearth daily.

It is on these foundations of exploration that 'Lets Go Outside' sets out, the exhibition defines it's own tribal tourism to an outsider community which often acts as the life blood and inspiration for the emergent new wave of internet aware art. Through this lens we mark out the terrain of the exotic other, attempting a definition of autonomy that is beyond our own rarefied tastes.

During the construction of ‘Lets Go Outside’, a series of problematic questions have arisen, the most pressing of which has been; Is it possible for us to fairly create a show from producers that exist outside of the art world parameters we work within, without becoming condescending or elitist?

The question becomes increasingly problematic when you consider that we have in effect experienced the collapse of the mainstream, with popular culture now dispersed between niche pockets of fetishism. To place what we ourselves produce and identify as culturally/politically relevant as existing in some way above what it is we see in these communities that appear alternative to our own, would be naive and perhaps short sighted.

Is it perhaps possible that we are now beginning to truly experience the “horizontal field of all possible pictorial forms”? as described by Boris Groys in which he asserts;

“One after another, so-called primitive artworks, abstract forms, and simple objects from everyday life have all acquired the kind of recognition that once used to be granted only to the historically privileged artistic masterpieces.”

Is it possible that we exist individually within our fantasy bubbles, in which social constructs and the validity of ones taste is an illusion, determined purely by the walls of our own reality. What seems absurd in the production cycle of the other (or outsider), is only as a result of the now naturally occurring hyper development by which each subculture/group/tribe has been given with the ubiquity of the internet. The only difference between what we know of the exotic other and ourselves is that this diversification of taste and fetishism is leading to the impossibility of any kind of classification system.

As a direct response to the homogenisation of current internet art that has come about as a result of Tumblr -the blending of aesthetic and authorship- to the degree that anything beyond surface interpretation becomes problematic and thus due to the nature of image exchange, this can be extended to all forms of artistic practice, whether aware or ignorant of such development.

We look to the other, the equal producer to ask “Why?”, what is the necessity/impetus for the production of these immaterial objects. Is it mere documentation or entertainment through creation that leads to the existence of these things? Is there any unifying motive between producers, in the same way that artists attempt a contribution to culture or the deconstruction of accepted notions of such.

Does then the dividing line between the aforementioned internet new wave and the alternative producer exist in motive, in so much as the trending practice for artists is to create autonomous artifacts for inspection, whilst the works/objects displayed in this show function online as documentation of an existence and/or the ephemera of a personal project. What do we stand to gain from identifying these dividing lines, when inevitably in the not so distant future they will be broken down? The very existence of this show contributing towards the destruction of such divisions.