Mark Amerika’s classic work of net art, GRAMMATRON, is featured in the new exhibition Web-Retro taking place at the Seoul Museum of Art from March 12 – June 19, 2019.
The exhibition commemorates the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web (WWW) and illuminates classic works of contemporary art that use the internet as the artist’s primary medium for experiments in form and content.
The exhibition consists largely of an offline exhibition held at the SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art and a web page introducing artworks through the online network.
Here’s a remix of the auto-translation of the catalogue intro:
Web-Retro focuses on the World Wide Web, a hypertext transfer protocol that has fundamentally changed the technological and environmental conditions in which communication, image production, consumption and artistic practice have operated over the last 30 years. In the 1990s and 2000s, with the advent of the Internet as a new medium for artistic production, artists were exploring their new roles, rules, possibilities and limitations. Looking back at this period, we would like to show how art customs have changed through the Internet. To do this, we reconstruct three aspects based on the characteristics of internet art:
“How does Internet art influence society and how has this influence been related to other developments in the contemporary art world?”
“How does Internet art reflect changes in cognition, individual existence and image production?”
“How did Internet art expand the boundaries of art at that time?”
In response to these questions, the curators have introduced a collection of significant artworks that use cyberspace as an alternative compositional and distribution platform and tactical media environment.
This exhibition is the starting point for more inclusive art historical research on internet art, something that has not been systematically organized in the Korean contemporary art world. The curators hope that the exhibition will spur on institutions to consider collecting and preserving Internet art despite its non-material characteristics.
