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Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966)
Whitechapel Gallery London 29 January to 15 May
To start at the beginning is not an option when entering 'Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966)' at London's Whitechapel Gallery. The exhibition is an ambitious attempt to map technological developments against their use in art practice across a 50-year time period beginning in 1966. Except that's not where you begin. Viewers work their way towards 1966 from the seemingly impossible position of a fixed present. Olaf Breuning's Text Butt, 2015, and Katja Novitskova's Innate Disposition, 2012, greet us on entry and are therefore, by extension of the exhibition's logic, positioned as the most contemporary characterisation of art and technology's entanglement. Text Butt presents an oversized photographic image of a human bum, leant against the wall, excreting a garbled conversation seen through the familiar blue and green text bubbles of instant messaging. The speed of response has produced an asymmetrical conversation, rendering the dialogue nonsensical: 'Did you had fun last night?' 'whaterver you think'. Novitskova's adjacent Innate Disposition is a free-standing digital image of a cute, doe-eyed rodent nestling in the palm of a human hand. The banal vernacular of internet entertainment is inserted uncannily into the real world and positions you firmly in the prosaic digital realm.
From this point on, the relationship artists have with the internet becomes the central tenet among the various propositions put forward about how artists have both used and commented upon the technology of their own age. However, the categorisation of this use quickly switches from the irreverent to the political, via a series of manoeuvres that jump between a vast array of different modes of expression: work that uses the internet pragmatically as a platform for its dissemination; artwork that is structurally embedded in the fabric of the internet and couldn't exist any other way; or, simply, artworks that appropriate the vernacularisms of the internet and computer graphics into the physical plane of the art object. This is evidenced by the inclusion of painting in the first gallery. Petra Cortright's gestural paintings on both silk and aluminium furnish a trompe l'oeil effect, but later reveal...