DRAMATICA by JODI at Green Cube Gallery
2019
The IRL/URL project addresses our day-to-day relationship with technology and how, through the same medium, such relationship is represented, engaging in a reciprocal loop of observation and re-enactment.
Shifted away from the realm of communication strategies, stock photography has become one of the many things you can offer to appease the big online-presence anxiety that affects corporations and associations as much as individuals.
Like many of us, JODI likes to collect this popular photographic genre, in which corporate stylistics seem to infiltrate folklore. As economy dictates visibility, the limits of the mutual contamination between individual (or collective) sensibility and profit-oriented constructed images fade increasingly. Spontaneity of expression is problematized as the desire to be represented and to represent actions drowns in the big media-flow. Everything is dramatic and theatrical, as in thèa tron, the place of spectacle. Naive generic photos become a functional unentertaining version of “‘Theatrocratia’: the use of theatre to dominate the masses by manipulating their reflexes and sensations” (Benjamin, 1966).
JODI focuses on tech-cameos in the genre, such as the smartphone as an object: the straight narration given by its normal use morphs into the hilarity of curiosity. The artwork is best experienced in the same medium it focuses on 📱📱📱: thanks to common technologies that trace the phone’s position, the viewer is stimulated to re-enact such dramatic plastic poses IRL. Take part in the big theatre of representation and get caught in the middle of the emotive-tech-image flow.
JODI or jodi.org is a Netherlands-based artist duo formed by Joan Heemskerk (b. 1968, the Netherlands) and Dirk Paesmans (b. 1965, Brussels). The duo pioneered significant approaches of the early web-based art in the mid-1990s, and continues to work with a wide variety of media and techniques. JODI’s work often appears in the history of electronic and media art, and has been exhibited worldwide at Documenta X, Stedelijk Museum, ZKM, ICC (Tokyo), CCA Glasgow, Guggenheim Museum (New York), Centre Pompidou, Eyebeam, FACT (Liverpool), and Museum of Moving Image (New York).
Greencube.gallery is a nomadic online/offline exhibition space run by Guido Segni and Matìas Ezequiel Reyes. It aims to flow in and out of the digital screen in order to stress the limits and the relationship between virtual and real.
In the end art is not a collection of objects, it is a collection of events and states. Like states of matter, URL and IRL aren’t opposite but just two distinct forms in which matter can exist under different conditions.
