C94 Collective
P2P or peer-to-peer is a collaborative exhibition featuring the two contrasting facets of the social network – publicity and piracy, sharing and stealing. But beyond presenting its good and bad aspects, the show also aims to represent a landscape comprised of a chaotic fusion of functional and futile information. The exhibition will involve two-dimensional, three-dimensional works that may even be accessed and presented as an interactive interface via social networking sites.
The exhibit runs from 14 October until 4 November at NOVA Gallery, Warehouse 12A, La Fuerza Compound, 2241 Don Chino Roces Ave., Makati City.
For more information call 392-7797 or send an electronic mail to gallerynova@gmail.com or visit www.novagallerymanila.com
C94
C94 is a platform for collective projects of a group of artist-contemporaries from the UP College of fine Arts class of 1994. As such the platform represents the artworks of the peers, their awareness of history, traditions of artistic craftsmanship and discourse of contemporary Philippine art. The group manifests their belief in the return of current practice to rootedness, community and a sense of relevance. Their project s seek to re-present the locus of art practice in the range of humanistic inquiry, and in the larger framework of world-making.
P2P Facing the Social Network
The social network is an inescapable contemporary fact. It is the offspring of the digital world, of cyberspace, of the global village. To those who celebrate it, the network is a means to be public, to have a front for the populace of the globe. Yet to those who are suspicious of it, the same publicity is also a means for stalking and attack. It is a fishbowl where private lives are being pried into without warning, and sometimes without warrant. The same can be said of p2p, which in cyber speak means peer-to-peer. It is a networking software that allows people to share media contents of their computers to others. In the affirmative, p2p is sharing; in the negative it is piracy.
P2P: facing the social network is an art project that looks into the parameters and perimeters, the dreams and dangers, the sharing and snagging of the contemporary phenomena of global communication. Beyond presenting the pros and cons, this project involves the representation of a landscape of tumultuous, overloaded, highly stratified traffic of messages both profound and inane within the social networks.
The project involves two distinct but related works: a large scale painting and a site-specific installation of sculptural works.
The large scale painting (The Social Network) shall be an interactive piece, involving five painters working simultaneously. The work shall be a two-dimensional representation of the structure of the social network (not its interface), and reveals the iconography of such graphic traffic in several images and layers of the painted surface.
The installation (Avatar Avenues) shall involve the production of life-scale works and peripheral objects, which shall be presented within the floor area of the gallery. This work emphasizes the possibility of physical isolation as a necessity for social network. By building structures of linakge, the technology inevitably does away with the necessity for contact and face-to-face encounters, leaving the interaction to avatars and gravatars.
The project will also be uploaded as an interactive interface on most social networking sites and video streaming sites during the duration of the exhibition. Online reaction to the work shall be collected and presented in a catalog in digital and printed form.
