We hope this email finds you well.
Apologies for any cross posting between different MLs!
Tomorrow, Saturday October 4th, we are going to launch 'A Contemporary Portrait of the Internet Artist' at âReality Check, a group show in Udine (Italy) produced by ULTRA and curated by Filippo Lorenzin. We would like to share with you a few details about our new artwork, and we hope this can be interesting for anyone in this list.
The title of the new artwork is 'A Contemporary Portrait of the Internet Artist'. It is a series of portraits which we commissioned underpaid Chinese painters to draw for us. Each portrait represents a copyrighted photo found on the Getty images archive using âartistâ as research keyword.
Here is the page of the project on our website
http://www.iocose.org/works/a_contemporary_portrait_of_the_internet_artist.html
where you can find images and information about the concept and related artworks.
Below you can find the press release for âA Contemporary Portrait of the Internet Artistâ.
Please let us know what you think, thanks!
Best Regards,
IOCOSE
---
PRESS RELEASE
IOCOSE art group is proud to present âA Contemporary Portrait of the Internet Artistâ. The artwork consist in a series of portraits, which the group commissioned underpaid Chinese painters to draw. Each portrait represents a copyrighted photo found on the Getty Images archive using âartistâ as research keyword. The portraits will be exhibited at Reality Check, a group show in Udine (Italy) produced by ULTRA and curated by Filippo Lorenzin, that will launch on October 4.
With 'A Contemporary Portrait of the Internet Artist', IOCOSE proposes a series of portraits of the many different modes of being an artist in the internet age. The group has selected a series of digital photographs representing 'artists' and sent these to a group of Chinese artisans who could paint those same images on canvas. The photographs were originally stored on an online and copyrighted archive by Getty Images. In its own turn, Getty Images had commissioned the photographs to represent the stereotypical 'artist' of our age. Those photographs were produced by professionals from different parts of the globe, and involved actors and models who posed as 'artists'.
IOCOSE, the Chinese painters, Getty, the photographers and the models, each represented a different mode of being artist. Each one has been commissioning, or being commissioned, art production and has been assembling, selecting and curating images and other artists (and images of artists). Each character in the story has been a parasite of the other, each a host for the next one. The chain involved practices that are quite common nowadays in the production of art: exploitation and outsourcing, exchanges of files and money transactions, sharing of skills and copyrighting. The portraits intend to reflect on the plurality of different modes of making art.
Indeed, the final portraits will necessarily continue the chain, and in a sense they already are. The digital images of the portraits will circulate online, be copied, posted and tweeted by journalists and bloggers. The portraits might be bought and become private property. But also continue being exhibited. And photographed.
Stations and paths together form a system. Points and lines, beings and relations. What is interesting might be the construction of the system, the number and disposition of stations and paths. Or it might be the flow of messages passing through the lines. [...] But one must write as well of the interceptions, of the accidents in the flow along the way between stations - of changes and metamorphoses. (M. Serres, The Parasite, University of Minnesota Press, 1980: 10-11)
---
paolo - IOCOSE
http://iocose.org