We=Link 2.0 Open Call for Student Works
Open Call for Student Submissions A Chronus Art Center (CAC) exhibition, a project of We=Link November, 2020
Submission / Recommendation Deadline: Midnight, Monday, August 31st, 2020 Please direct your recommendations to
info@chronusartcenter.org
Enter submission @ http://welink2opencall.chronusartcenter.org/
We=Link is Chronus Art Center’s new platform for presenting online art. It was conceived in late February of 2020 as a response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic which forced closures and suspensions of many arts institutions around the world.
We=Link launched its first online exhibition We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces on March 30, 2020, featuring artists aaajiao, Raphaël Bastide, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne, JODI, LI Weiyi, Evan Roth, Slime Engine, Helmut Smits, Yangachi and YE Funa. The exhibition, which transpired during a moment of the eruption of the global pandemic, not only confronts the immediate social reality, but also addresses the general condition of the world at large under the pressing perils of natural and social disruptions and precariousness. The exhibition recapitulated the importance and vitality of net art at a time when societies more visibly than ever rely on networks to operate and carry on.
We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces was co-presented by Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Art Center Nabi (Seoul), Rhizome of the New Museum (New York), e-flux (New York), HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel), iMAL (Brussels), LABORATORIA Art & Science Foundation (Moscow), Leonardo/ISAST, MU Hybrid Art House (Eindhoven), SETI AIR/SETI Institute (Mountain View), and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam). Art Center Nabi and Rhizome of the New Museum contributed to the commission of new works.
The exhibition was also presented by New Museum’s First Look, New Art Online.
As a commitment to support the discourse and presentation of net art and a continuation of the We=Link framework, Chronus Art Center is planning to mount a comprehensive exhibition in the fall of 2020, which aims to investigate the most current modes of net art production while situating its intellectual and artistic roots in the historical trajectory of Radical Software, Unstable Media, of the Temporary Autonomous Zone and Metadesign that circumvent and contest the established modus operandi both commercial and cultural, in order to imagine an organic and autopoietic network. The exhibition will seek to identify strategies that resonate with that of Thing.net and Name.Space in the age of Facebook, Twitter and WeChat; discover shelters that inhabit the ghost of Electronic Café International at a time when YouTube and Instagram rule with supremacy; scavenge blue plans that resurrect the reverie of Netomat in the presence of the subsuming dominancy of IE and Safari or cling unto the futile recalcitrance attempting to hold back the digital Enclosure by the likes of Google, Baidu and Amazon.
Above all, how artists have, via the means of creative technologies in the spirit of the open network made porous and volatile the increasingly reified internet and how artistic techniques may proactively short-circuit the feedforward loops of cognitive capitalism and spectacles of the panopticon society.
Parallel to the exhibition at CAC’s 500-square-meter (5380-square-foot) gallery, CAC will also organize an online component in collaboration with several international art institutions. This online show welcomes student works from around the world which demonstrate excellency in exploration in and experimentation with the potential of network through an informed purview and critical sensibility. We encourage submission and recommendation of works with new insights and risk-taking positions that problematize the net and art as we know it today and demonstrate new directions in the conception, production and distribution of net art in the most creative application of the word: network and art or art and network.
About Chronus Art Center
Established in 2013, Chronus Art Center (CAC) is China’s first nonprofit art organization dedicated to the presentation, research / creation and scholarship of media art. CAC with its exhibitions, residency-oriented fellowships, lectures and workshop programs and through its archiving and publishing initiatives, creates a multifaceted and vibrant platform for the discourse, production and dissemination of media art in a global context. CAC is positioned to advance artistic innovation and cultural awareness by critically engaging with media technologies that are transforming and reshaping contemporary experiences.
