Audio By Carbonatix
Ubiquitous as it already is, the Internet is only beginning to make a major impact on the art world. An exhibit opening tonight at Counterpath features two works by digital video artist Conor McGarrigle, who explores the art inherent to the Net in unique and intriguing ways.
The first, the “BitTorrent Trilogy,” consists of three incomplete downloads of popular TV shows — Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones — and uses the technology and culture of file-sharing to produce a glitchy, surreal vision of pop culture. “These are an effort to visualize this, to see what it actually looks like, to somehow capture the process itself,” McGarrigle says. “It’s a social process, what people are [sharing], and the technical thing, the codecs and the protocols and how the network actually works.”
The second piece, “24h Social,” splices together 86,400 Vine videos — six-second clips shareable on Twitter — for a 24-hour look at the world of social media that critiques the ubiquity of data-mining on the web. “Once something goes up on the Internet, it becomes data, and that data is being used in all sorts of ways we don’t know about,” McGarrigle explains. “We have no oversight or control over how it’s used most of the time.”
The show opens tonight at 7 p.m. with a free reception at Counterpath, 613 22nd Street, and continues through February 21; admission is free. For more information, visit counterpathpress.org.
Feb. 7-21, 2014
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