Exhibition (Festival Mal au pixel) Network Hack

From October 27 to December 30, 2012 / The gallery at La Gaité Lyrique - Paris

The Gallery, at the heart of the technological and artistic diversion at the Gaîté lyrique, hosts installations by international artists who confront their practices with the technologies used by information and communication networks in order to better question them.

With the advent of the social web and the arrival of third-generation telecommunications systems, the data that can identify, locate and track each individual is becoming more and more numerous and intrusive every day.

The convergence of the different digital networks builds a narrow mesh from which it becomes difficult to escape.

Faced with these challenges, artists, researchers and amateurs are hijacking these technologies, exploring the flaws of this new ecosystem and imagining, for this unprecedented exhibition, utopian uses.

For nine weeks the exhibition brings together the work of !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Julian Oliver & Danja Vasiliev, Telekommunisten, Timo Toots and Benjamin Gaulon.

The artists

Benjamin Gaulon (France) 

From recycling Nintendo controllers into musical instruments to the urban transformation of célèbre
jeu Pong (from Pong GameTM), Benjamin Gaulon works on diversion and recycling. He wonders about waste as a product dispossessed of its owner and its market value, and more broadly about the place of the used object in our society of over-consumption.

Timo Toots (Estonia)

Timo Toots is an Estonian visual artist who, after studying computer science and photography, is interested in new media. His work analyzes and how the information society in which we live is based on interactive installations. He was the 2012 winner of the Golden Nica d'Ars Electronica, Linz, with Memopol II.

This work scans from your ID cards and passports all the personal data about you available on the net, adding some whimsical data. Take your identity papers with you to experience it.

Telekommunisten (Germany/Canada)

Telekommunisten brings together communist entrepreneur Dmytri Kleiner, founder of Miscommunication technologies and author of the Telekommunist Manifesto, and artist-researcher Baruch Gottlieb, author of My Gratitude for Technology at Atropos Press. The Berlin collective questions communication technologies from the perspective of political economy and is particularly interested in alternative and collective economic models that would found a free society.

! Mediengruppe Bitnik (Germany)

This collective of artists, founded in 2003, adapts known hacker strategies to show their artistic and cultural potential. It infiltrates existing systems (computer, media), diverts them from their fonctions
et and proposes new uses for them. The preferred targets are live data retransmission systems and the media whose mechanisms they reproduce and manipulate 
pour offer a new artistic way of apprehending them.

Julian Oliver/Danja Vasiliev (Germany)

Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev, based in Berlin, define themselves as critical engineers and are at the origin of The Critical Engineering Manifesto

New Zealander Julian Oliver works at the critical intersection between art and technology. His work has been presented in international museums and he has given a large number of workshops and master classes on software art, augmented reality, creative hacking, datavisualization and visual architecture. He is an active campaigner for free software in art creation, distribution and education.

The Russian Danja Vasiliev is a real geek whose work regularly makes a mockery of our contemporary affection for digital life and questions the global trend towards becoming a cyborg. His works are often described as technological interventions - conceptual pieces, mixing hardware and software. He is currently developing several specific devices that will become the new tools of his digital interventionism.

Accompanied visit every Tuesday evening at 6pm (free on presentation of ticket).

Take advantage of a ticket coupled with the exhibition HELLO™ H5 for 8€/6€/0€ (full/discounted/membership rates).

More information : http://www.gaite-lyrique.net/evenement/network-hack

{Jacuzzi on}