Happens or it didn't pic

The Blueproject Foundation presents the exhibition “Happens or it didn't pic”, the first solo exhibition in Spain of artists Eva and Franco Mattes, which will be on show in the Sala Project from the 10th of October 2018 to the 13th of January 2019. The two New York based Italian artists, also known as 0100101110101101.org, are considered amongst the pioneers of Net art. Together with Bani Brusadin, they direct and curate the festival The Influencers, at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB).

In this exhibition, conceived exclusively for the Blueproject Foundation, the Mattes present a group of four recent works: three episodes of Dark Content (2015), exhibited in Spain for the first time on this occasion; For Internet Use Only (2018); and two new works, entitled What Has Been Seen (2018) and Untitled (2018).

Dark Content (2015) is series of video installations about Internet content moderators. Contrary to common belief, the removal of offensive material from the Internet is not carried out by sophisticated algorithms, but by anonymous human beings. The artists have interviewed one hundred moderators and have created a series of videos in which avatars with computer-generated voices retell the memories of their subjects about contents that they have removed from the web, including pornography, sexual solicitation, and racism. The video interviews are displayed on screens mounted on Ikea home office furniture, which are placed in unusual arrangements, thus disrupting the physical approach of the public to the installations.

Pieces of furniture are also featured in For Internet Use Only (2016), this time as screens on which the video is projected. Presented at first as a performance, what we see in the exhibition is the recording of a live stream of the computer desktop of the artists. For the duration of the recording, we see all their computer activity with no censorship whatsoever: all kinds of actions such as Facebook browsing, replying to emails (whose content we are allowed to read), Internet searches… The artists thus efface the boundaries between public and private, reveal their intimacy, and make the public into a witness to their actions. However, as spectators of the exhibition, the artists put us in the position of a voyeur, the same position we find ourselves in daily in front of our own computer or mobile phone screens.

In the vein of this investigative path, in which they share their personal information with the public, the new project (still untitled) offers graphic representations of the artists' relationships by mapping their emails. For the piece shown in this exhibition, the first one in a new series based on data analysis, the artists once again use office furniture which they converted into small display cabinets meant as a physical medium for print. Before the cabinets are assembled, infographics are printed on them, showing the directions and volume of the artists' email connections.

Another new and previously unseen artwork is What Has Been Seen (2018), a sculpture of a taxidermy cat sitting on a microwave containing an erased hard drive. This piece is inspired by cat memes –and can perhaps be interpreted as a continuation or evolution of their well known Ceiling Cat (2016)– and is named after the Internet axiom: "(What Has Been Seen) Cannot Be Unseen", which states that one's memory literally cannot get rid of the mental image that lingers after looking at a disturbing photo or video.

In “Happens or it didn't pic” we can witness the universe of the web through different perspectives thanks to the vision of Eva and Franco Mattes, who have carried out a thorough and convincing investigation on this matter through videos, installations and everyday objects.

Eva and Franco Mattes (born in Italy, living in New York, USA) are an artistic duo, at first known as 0100101110101101.org, that has collaborated since 1995. They’re considered among the main representatives of Net Art. They have continually made work that responds to and dissects our contemporary networked condition, always approaching the ethics and politics of life online with a darkly humorous edge. They are founders and co-directors of the international festival The Influencers, held annually at the CCCB, Barcelona (2004-present). They are also part of the collective Don't Follow the Wind, a collaborative project that organized an inaccessible exhibition in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone (2015-present). The Mattes have received grants from the Whitney Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; New York Foundation for the Arts; and were awarded the New York Prize 2006 from the Italian Academy at Columbia University. They are recipients of the Creative Capital Award (2016), won Rhizome's Prix Net Art (2017) and received the Italian Council grant (2018). Recent group exhibitions are at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie (2017); Yokohama Triennale (2017); Biennale of Sydney (2016); Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2016); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, 2016); among others. In 2001 they were among the youngest artists ever included in the Venice Biennale.