MANCHESTER.- The Lowry, Salford, announces Right Here, Right Now a major new exhibition providing a thought-provoking snapshot of what’s happening in contemporary digital art.
Right Here, Right Now brings together 16 international artists who use and explore digital technologies. Together they address how technology affects our lives - be that through surveillance, artificial intelligence, voyeurism or online dating.
Created in the last five years, their critical, playful and illuminating artworks challenge our understanding of the digital systems that surround us, while making visible those that are hidden. Many are interactive, while others transcribe data into stunning visual displays or strange music. All invite us to re-think our own increasingly connected and systematised lives.
Exhibition highlights:
• German innovator Robert Henke creates a living visual artwork of beauty with a randomly programmed laser installation
• Manchester-based Mishka Henner merges images of oil fields sourced from Google Earth to address matters of surveillance, ownership and environment
• UK digital art pioneers Thomson & Craighead demonstrate that a computer virus can be aesthetic with their animated installation Corruption. Another work, Stutterer, transcribes the human genome into photo images taken from the internet and lasts with a duration of more than 60 years
• Timo Arnall’s room-size immersive film installation of a Spanish data centre reveals the hidden infrastructure of the internet, and the very physical spaces needed to create the ‘cloud’
• Branger_Briz’s A Charge for Privacy tests our comfort with permission by letting visitors charge their mobiles in exchange for copying photographs from visitors’ phones, and sharing them with new gallery audiences
• Daniel Rozin’s kinetic Darwinian Straw Mirror artwork allows playful interaction through an Xbox Kinect motion sensor which places the public within the artwork
• Sergina’s performances explore post-physical gender identities and sexuality on the internet
• Sound-artist Ed Carter creates a music score from the atmospheric data collected within The Lowry
• Upcoming talent Felicity Hammond explores printing processes and digitisation on architectural scale with Restore to Factory Settings
This will be The Lowry’s first major digital art exhibition, bringing together leading UK digital curators who have each nominated an artwork for the show. Interestingly, but not intentionally, all of them are women at the forefront of their field. The show is produced and lead-curated by the Lowry’s Digital Programming Associate Lucy Dusgate of Quays Culture, as part of The Lowry’s creative approach to presenting art across the venue.
Lucy Dusgate, lead curator of Right Here. Right Now, comments: “This exhibition provides a moment in time for us to reflect on the developments in art and digital over the last five years, and anticipate the next tantilising steps. These brilliant artists are creating world-class art. I am delighted that we at The Lowry can take these from the fringes of mainstream knowledge and introduce them to a broader audience.
“Digital technologies affect all our lives. With open data, the internet of things and constant new digital developments, Right Here, Right Now asks whether our perceptions and interactions are changing to the point where we are now all becoming ‘systems thinkers’.
Right Here, Right Now is part of the Lowry's ongoing mission to enrich, engage and entertain by presenting the very best in the performing and visual arts in a local, regional, national and international sense.
