Does the internet really exist? In what forms? How does it operate?

To date, the spectacle of the post-digital as fashioned by the internet seems omnipresent. Both as a new model of “digital commoning” and as an invisible “Internet collective unconscious”, it affects our everyday modes of thought. In sum, it increasingly permeates contemporary life, full as it is of inertia.

The digital colonialism as driven by algorithmic aesthetics is continually replicating, dispersing, and dominating the post-digital body amid a collective collapse in the entire internet world—at once invading and governing that hyperlinked landscape continually collapsing and self-mending. The work of art practitioners living in a post-media age increasingly seems like automatic digital sampling, by day and by night engaging in ceaseless sampling and mash-ups on social media and internet platforms, ensnared in a euphoria of image post-production.

In endless profusion, internet broadcasts and blog platforms have surged. When the tles in the air, the world of the network keeps assembling numerous amateur samplers who emerge from images and then return to the images. They crave engaging in performances and creation on different internet platforms, and take part in the production of all-new virtual spaces. This produces, for the identity of the contemporary artist, a pressing anxiety.

The internet exists in a state of being already dead and yet still being alive; it is in the state of network superimposition of not being there and yet being omnipresent. Much like the theory of the superposition of states in quantum mechanics, it both exists in such a state and does not exist in such a state; in other words, a state of uncertainty. Only when you consciously observe one of the states will this superposition of states collapse into a reality. Living in such networked states of simultaneity, interconnection, superposition, and entanglement, the new generation has from the very start had an intense reliance on the virtual world. Just like the actual body and the countless virtual identities behind the screen, or the interaction of “l(fā)ikes” on social media and the indifference and callousness in the actual world, digital samplers experience—on these new platforms, capitalist colonies—multifarious intermeshed states and a sense of fragmentation emanating deep within reality.

Translated by Daniel Ho

About the exhibition

Duration: Apr. 17th, 2017 to May. 18th, 2017

Producer: Huang Zhonghua

Art Director: Yang Shu

Curator: Ma Yongfeng

Artists: Li Tingwei, Lin Ke, Liang Ban, Liu Yefu, Luo Wei, Miao Ying, Payne Zhu, Sun Xiaoxing, Tian Xiaolei, Tu Lang, Wang NewOne, Ye Funa+Beio, Kim Laughton

Coordinators: Li Li, Zhu Jun

Opening Time: 16:00, Apr. 16th, 2017

Venue: F1-F2, The Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art, Bloc 3, Xinghui Liangjiang Art Business Center, Liangjiang New District, Chongqing

Courtesy of the artists and The Galaxy Museum of Contemporary Art.