LONDON.- The Whole World is a list of lists: a programme of artists' film and video and an interactive online exhibition. Both a formal device and a political strategy, film and video that deploys a list as part of its structure often does so with political intent: to subvert hierarchies, to undermine rationalism or to reveal contradiction. In contemporary culture the pop chart's Top 10 has been replaced by an ever-expanding craze for "Top 100s" of everything from Hollywood genres to celebrity gaffes. The Whole World attempts to wrestle back the initiative…

A selection of artists' film and video that feature lists or different kinds of taxonomies - visual, audio or textual – are presented as an online exhibition of extracts. Works by Dalia Neis, Uriel Orlow, Jean-Gabirel Périot, Michael Robinson and Valerie Tevere take as their subject such wildly diverse lists as depictions of saints, everything on Ebay, magazine advertising, our mediated world, protest, violence and war, the pages of National Geographic magazine and the words spoken by people on the streets of New York. Text scrolls across the screen, images flash past, immersive landscapes ultimately disintegrate. Many things are logged and something is undone.

At the same time, viewers are invited to contribute to the programme by uploading their own video list, be that an extract from an existing work or something made specially for the purpose, to compile a unique, exponential collection: an extraordinary list of lists, of the world as we know it – the whole world.

The Whole World is situated somewhere between the absurd and obsessive enterprises of Flaubert's eponymous characters Bouvard and Pecuchet (they hopelessly collect and explore until, exhausted, they revert to their original jobs as copy clerks) and the Japanese animated game Katamari in which players roll all matter – objects, buildings, landscapes, the world itself - into snowballing globes of stuff. The Whole World is ridiculous and irreverent, ambitious and viral.

Programme: Dalia Neis, Saints, 2005 / Jean Gabriel Periot, 21.04.02, 2002 / Uriel Orlow, Everything in Red, Yellow, Blue and Green, 2006 / Michael Robinson, You Don't Bring Me Flowers, 2005 / Valerie Tevere, When I Say / Valerie Tevere & Angel Navarez, Freque ncy Allocations / Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975

Submitted work will be selected to join The Whole World as well as tank.tv's programme on the CASZartscreen in Amsterdam.

Ian White is Adjunct Film Curator for Whitechapel Gallery, London, an independent curator, writer and artist. Recent projects include Kinomuseum for the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and a new performance work in collaboration with Jimmy Robert for STUK, Belgium and De Appel, Amsterdam (2007/8).