How did the internet go from the utopian free-for-all, open source heaven, libertarian last frontier to the current state of permanent surveillance, exhibitionism and paranoia? This duplicity is the underlying thread that links the artists, activists, and researchers in The Black Chamber, an exhibition, a symposium, an urban intervention and a publication. The Black Chamber aims at discussing the delicate and often awkward role of art and imagination in the age of mass surveillance, stressing the multiple connections between post-studio art and independent research, grassroots reverse engineering, and new forms of political activism in the age of networks. Not just an exhibition ...

Born Digital is a benefit auction and an online exhibition made to support the activities of the Link Art Center on the online auction platform Paddle8. The event—the first with this focus taking place in Europe on this scale—includes more than 50 works kindly provided by 33 artists. For two weeks long, from April 15 to April 30, 2014, people and collectors are invited to visit the works and eventually to bid to support the artists and the organizers. The Link Art Center is the first Italian organization to collaborate with Paddle8, an online auction house that partners with non-profit organizations ...

The last decade has seen an incredible growth in the production and distribution of images and other cultural artefacts. The internet is the place where all these cultural products are stored, classified, voted, collected and trashed. What is the impact of this process on art making and on the artist? Which kind of dialogue is going on between amateur practices and codified languages? How does art respond to the society of information? This is a book about endless archives, image collections, bees plundering from flower to flower and hunters crawling through the online wilderness.

The first art movement to use collage to collapse together images and ideas, Dada also pioneered concepts, ideas, approaches and modi operandi that were later transfused into contemporary digital tools, becoming commonplace in the digital environment. To celebrate DADA 100, from 5 February 2016 to 5 February 201 7 the online platform and collaborative project Dadaclub.online shared high quality digital copies of original Dada artworks and magazine covers, inviting artists from all over the world to use them in their work. This book documents the project, presenting 148 remixes produced and shared by participants. Dada is nothing, enjoy Dada!

Vuk Ćosić, the Serbian pioneer of net.art, monologues with Franco and Eva Mattes, the famous Italian pair of art pranksters, also known as 0100101110101101.org. He leaves blanks to be filled by them in another moment, creating an asynchronous text performance. They build a dissertation about their recent works – like Freedom, No Fun and Plan C – as Eva and Franco Mattes add comments and further explanations to Ćosic’s observations and hints. The readers will find out that the three artists had met in Slovenia way back in 1998, when they were all the same person, Luther Blissett. Touchingly, Eva and Franco give thanks to Vuk for ...

Produced as a catalogue for the exhibition Holy Fire: Art of the Digital Age (2008), this book is more than a simple catalogue. Along with the works of the 27 artists in the exhibition it features the editors’ essays along with a collective interview involving some of the most important representatives of the new media art world. Holy Fire is not a book on new media art, but an exploration of the contemporary art of the digital age, and a pamphlet against the new media art paradigm and the self-isolation in which these practices evolved in the last sixty years. In ...

Peer Pressure is a collection of essays previously published online between 2010 and 2011. In the author’s words, “each essay is an impassioned description or prescription to understand the digital space we inhabit differently.” Most of these writings have been highly influential for the (relatively) small community the author addresses, eliciting many heated debates. The texts idealistically address creative platforms, image aggregators, relational practices, internet memes and much more.

Printed Web presents new web-to-print work by artists who use screen capture, image grab, site scrape and search query. Published twice a year by Library of the Printed Web. This issue co-published by the International Center of Photography, NYC and Paul Soulellis, Library of the Printed Web.

Just what is it that leads many contemporary artists to restage historic events great and small, performances of the past, and sometimes even imaginary events? Are they possessed by the post-modern demon? (albeit belatedly…) Does this practice spring from a cynical awareness of the decline of values, the surrender—be it dismal or joyful, it makes little difference—to the logic of the society of spectacle? Is it yet another variation of Francis Fukuyama’s bitter prophecy of “the end of history”? Or is it simply the end of the modern myth of the “originality” of the work of art, a further confirmation of the ...

#LAYERS: the ways in which the complexity of the digital environment manifests itself. Code and interface, public and private, material and immaterial, visible and invisible; the layers in a digital image; the strata of time in the archives of digital memory. This booklet is the archive/catalogue of the exhibition REFRESH01 – #LAYERS, curated by Fabio Paris and produced by the Link Art Center, that took place at Spazio Contemporanea, Brescia, from October 22 to November 19, 2016.

REFRESH is an exhibition series where each episode is titled with a specific #HASHTAG reflecting the key concept that the works and artists in the show gravitate around. REFRESH02 is #LAYERS_BRUSSELS. REFRESH01 #LAYERS moves to Bruxelles, at La Raffinerie (Charleroi-Danses), in collaboration with iMAL Center for Digital Cultures & Technology, and in doing so the show changes to include new artists and artworks. #LAYERS_BRUSSELS takes place exactly ten years after Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age (2008), the exhibition curated by Yves Bernard and Domenico Quaranta at l’iMAL, as well part of the off programme of Art Brussels: an event that played an ...