Review: Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966)

Abstract

Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) WHITECHAPEL GALLERY LONDON JANUARY 29-MAY 15, 2016 There is no escaping the gargantuan pair of women's buttocks greeting the visitor entering Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966). With a series of speech bubbles emerging from deep within, Olaf Breuning's wall-scale photograph Text Butt (2015) places onto the naked female body a fragmented smartphone conversation made up of unrelated questions and nonsensical replies, in which she is quite literally speaking out of her ass. Introducing the theme of the body's changing relationship to technology that curator Omar Kholeif described as the starting point of the show's exploration of art and the internet, this is just one of the (exclusively) female bodies chosen to map this connection. To the left sits Katja Novitskova's Innate Disposition 2 (2012), a large cutout print of a small furry animal, nestled in a pair of manicured women's hands. To the right, in James Bridle's Homo Sacer (2014), a projected holographic image of a smiling woman hovers behind a wooden desk. Reminiscent of the kind of hologram appearing in bureaucratic spaces such as airports and government buildings to provide depersonalized instructions, she is a virtual receptionist who flickers into life as each gallery-goer walks through the door. Quoting decontextualized extracts from various nations' citizenship legislation, her singsong intonation welcomes us in, at the same time drawing our attention to the ways in which our sense of belonging is fragile and might be revoked. It is not clear whether the gendered nature of this opening display was intentional or an unthinking coincidence, but it places the image of woman in interesting relation to the technology at the heart of the exhibition--as naked, sexualized body parts to be penetrated and overcome, or as a kind of gatekeeper, a guardian of the secrets that follow in all their noisy, brazen, and in places, trashy glory. Including over one hundred works by seventy artists, Electronic Superhighway takes us back through time, posing the question: How has the internet changed art? Broad in scope, the curated response encompasses a variety of media and approaches, from the latest social media platforms, net.art, and computer-generated drawing, to traditional oil painting, photography, sculpture, film, and video. It covers many thematic bases: appropriation and remediation, authenticity and digital manipulation, technology and identity, the deconstruction of modernist paradigms and traditions, surveillance, and resistant forms of political agency. It was perhaps unavoidable that many are treated with a light touch, and in the crowded spaces of the large ground floor galleries of contemporary work, the flashing colors and glaring screens create an experience that at times feels like a rapid frog-march through its various themes. There is a lot to see. Covering the ever-evolving platforms in which we engage with the internet today, all the way back to the pre-internet era in which the earliest digital stirrings presented an exciting prospect to artists of the 1960s, there is no shared artistic approach. But the fluctuating and often uncomfortable relationship that emerges as the human body adopts, incorporates, and at times resists technology is an enduring theme throughout. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It's about the internet, so there's a lot of sex. As part of his examination of its role in the negotiation of contemporary masculinity, Egyptian artist Mahmoud Khaled's series Do You Have Work Tomorrow? (2012) stages a Grindr conversation between two men. Presenting a fictional narrative as a series of thirty-two prints of iPhone screen shots, the banality of the dialogue draws attention to technology's everyday mediation of sexuality, despite the background turmoil of the Arab Spring suggested by the conversation's date. A similar relationship between social media and sexuality is explored in Celia Hempton's portraits of men encountered in chat rooms--albeit in a wholly different format. …