‘You are inside, and the digital world spins around you’
Dramatic installations anchor Themuseum’s digital arts exhibit
“I have seen many people spill their guts online, and I did so myself until, at last, I began to see that I had commodified myself.” — Carmen Hermosillo.
KITCHENER — Carmen Hermosillo was the first paid blogger on the internet before she quit posting, concerned that the Web was becoming shallow, commercial, corporate and narcissistic.
Her quote is now on a wall in Themuseum in downtown Kitchener as part of an installation called The Object of Internet. It serves as a warning about the Internet’s future.
It is now dominated by four huge corporations — Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft — and has become the most powerful advertising platform in the world.
The installation was created by Etienne Grenier and Simon Laroche. It is their vision of the “End of the Internet” where selfies spin endlessly in a digital void.
Museumgoers sit on a stool, their heads surrounded by spinning mirrors that reflect their images from every angle in a fast, blurry merry-go-round. Some take selfies as they sit on the stool, unintentionally confirming the artists dystopian vision of the Internet’s callow future.
“It is an allegory of the vacuity of online identity, the main figure we chose to play with is the selfie,” said Laroche in an interview Thursday night.
As the mirrors spin faster the reflections dissipate — the artists’ rendering of what happens to an individual’s humanity on the internet.
“It’s like the loss of self,” said Grenier. “We hope people will eventually be a bit critical of how they look at themselves on the web, and how people stage their own lives online.”
It was inspired, in part, by the Dreamachine, a flicker device created by William S. Burroughs, the father of The Beat Generation and Brion Gysin. The Dreamachine was a cardboard tube with a slit along one side that was placed over a light bulb, and spun on a turntable.
“This installation is like an inverted version of The Dreamachine,” said Grenier. “You are inside, and the digital world spins around you.”
Laroche is an artist and designer who teaches electronic arts at Concordia University in Montreal. Grenier is an artist who taught interactive, audiovisual design at Université de Québec in Montreal. They are both part of a nonprofit art collective called Project EVA, and both work in theatre, film, dance and fashion as well.
Their installation is part of Interaction, co-curated by Jane Tingley, a professor of hybrid media at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford Campus, and Alain Thibault, a composer, designer and electronic music artist who is also the artistic director of Elektra — the international digital arts festival held every year in Montreal.
“This is the best thing we have done so far,” said David Marksell, Themuseum’s
chief executive officer, in an interview at Thursday night’s opening.
Interaction includes 13 installations from artists across Canada. One is set up at Communitech in Tannery at 151 Charles St. Another is located in CIGI at 67 Erb St. West in Waterloo.
The curators wanted Canadian artists and interactive installations.
“I also wanted a range,” said Tingley. “Personally I wanted works that are critical, political and poetic. It is really about showing how interactivity is played out by artists in Canada.”
The installations have been exhibited around the world, and are the anchor for Themuseum’s Digital Dynamics 2018. Another exhibit called Internet Art opened Thursday night as well. .
Digital Dynamics began in October with Interplay, which features a collection of personal computers going back to the 1970s, a detailed replica of an 1980s-era electronics store and displays of old video games.
Digital Dynamics 2018 runs to May 13 at Themuseum in downtown Kitchener.