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Curatorial Statement

INFO is a digital platform that incorporates virtual environments. An exploration of archival practices in the context of emerging digital modes of artistic expressions and forms of being. The current paradigm shift exposes the necessity to imagine new emancipatory practices for non-physical forms of creation, mediation, and exposure; for the navigation and manipulation of abstract materials.

Within such a context Negentropic Fields was developed as a project that focuses on the work of 5 selected artists with responses and engagements from 5 international artist & curatorial teams.



Manifesto for Platform-Art_Archive-of-Archives
fXø (formAxioms) / I–M (INTER–MISSION)


Art, from objects to archives to platforms
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fXø Where is art? What is the (non-capital) value of art? What does it mean to archive art? What is the artist’s archive? What is curating multiple archives? The Object of art is a process. But what process? …a process that must be oriented towards the common. The Object of art is a process, one that requires the artist to construct an archive. A collective of artists becomes so an archive-of-archives, a space that requires the construction of a platform for orientation-manipulation – by the artists, curators, and public. A curated platform allows for art’s gestures to be grasped and transformed, allowing meaningful, constructive possibilities of recombination, appropriation, hybridisation. Platforms are strategic spaces for emancipation, for communities of artists at first, finally, for communities of subjects. Artists within this project are making art by constructing-curating archives (or making a “piece” and exposing the underlying archive), which will be part of an archive-of-archives. Archive-making is a necessary act not to store the past but to create a collaborative future.

Making and archiving “non-objects”
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I–M / fXø Art’s digital object is basically an archive made of versions. Artworks are to be seen as transformative “digital” objects, not as dead-final entities.
I–M Given the collaborative nature of a platform, how can digital formations and formulas (transformative digital objects) be applicable to the practices of artmaking? Here, artists are allowed to have versions (transformative or updated) of a piece; or to show the archival data of different pieces.
fXø However, if any model-object or part of it could be downloaded, indexed, reutilised; what is it that makes a specific model truly (essentially, meaningfully) different from others? What is the inherent value in a “version”? What makes one model an art-model, and not simply another “test” belonging to the infinite series, another commodified object of exchange, of consumption. Another “asset” (a term utilised in digital game production) to be exploited in other contexts? Art is in-completion, although at a certain point, a fragment must solidify showing a tendency, a vector, a tensor that opens thought to alternative/potential forms of being.
I–M The difference between artists who employ technology and the technologist, is that the artist tends not to be answerable to the function of the work, whilst the work of art tends to question its own existence.

Performance
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fXø Is the place of art an act, the virtuous act? What and where is virtuosity qua performance in the wide heterotopia of the digital?
I–M The works of art are not “linear forms”, rather the works should be experienced in several points of engagement, where they are transformed. In this project, the artworks are made digitally for the digital realm, through process-based customisation or developmental stages. The artwork engages the audience, it is a performative, time and process-based relationship. In the current Post-Covid-19 landscape the place and role of museums-exhibitions needs to be reevaluated. What is art outside the institutions? We cannot simply plan the deconstruction of the museum, as the museum remains a place offline for confrontation, one that shall contain and critique art at the same time.
fXø We shall grasp the function of “the museum without walls” (A. Malraux), understand the “archive without museum” (H. Foster) to move into something else, a space yet to be designed. What we desire are art platforms living autonomously in the digital but able to create community, and able to swerve, to revitalize the spaces within institutional walls and enclosures.

INTER–MISSION

INTER–MISSION is an art collective dedicated to discourses of technology in art initiated in 2016 by Urich LAU and TEOW Yue Han. Focusing on interdisciplinary and collaborative works in video art, audiovisual, performance, installation and interactive art. The collective aims to inhabit the gap between technologically engaged artworks, artists and audiences.  INTER—MISSION builds transnational networks to promote sustained dialogue and engagement with media practices. It creates a space that encourages collaboration, reflection and participation in our ever-changing technological environment through interactive performances, installation, video screenings, international and interdisciplinary dialogues, and knowledge sharing.

︎ inter-mission.art  ︎ @intermission.art

formAxioms

formAxioms was established in 2018 by Eva Castro and Federico Ruberto as a research framework, agency and teaching cluster. formAxioms’ agency is promoted by a research based on speculative narratives that engages design focusing on two scales: territorial and architectural assemblages. At both the laboratory research is computationally driven and it integrates VR/AR in its pipeline: at territorial scales as means to edit-alter-display structural information and to create participatory practices, at architectural scales as means to problematize narrative-sequences-experiences by questioning/hybridizing the space-time of the subject by way of challenging its frame, by altering the dyad “digital/physical”. The studio’s interest in the redeveloping of the relation real/ideal post post-modernity, is carried forward through first a critical engagement with fiction and by adhering to an ontology of ""modelling"": two pathways for creating syntaxes that allow for both, the constitution of (a shared) structure and the divergence from it.

︎ formaxioms.com  ︎ @form.axioms