In Between - A NetArt Exhibition for Bright Night
One Night Group Show of NetArtActivities
About the exhibition
in frame of our Bright Night
with Amy Alexander | Vuk Ćosić | Constant Dullaart | Sarah Friend & Arkadiy Kukarkin | JODI | Olia Lialina | Jonas Lund | Joana Moll | Everest Pipkin | Sebastian Schmieg | Miyö van Stenis | Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman
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This net art group show is part of Bright Night, a sound night curated by panke.gallery. Bright Night refers to the equinox—a fleeting moment of balance, when day and night are briefly equal. It is neither black nor white, but something in between: a space of ambiguity—fragile, flickering, essential, and unnerving.
At a time when public discourse often forces us into binaries—with us or against us—it feels urgent to preserve spaces for complexity and contradiction. And yet, even ambivalence must know its boundaries. A firm No is sometimes necessary. A line that must not be crossed. This exhibition reflects the tension between openness and refusal, freedom and responsibility—a tension that defines our present moment.
We are witnessing the end of an era—one of comfort, excess, and careless consumption. We took without restraint, without regard, until abundance ran dry. That has made us complicit, knowingly or not. Bright Night becomes a space for grief and self-reflection.
The minimalist net art works presented here hold a quiet power. They are dense, intense signs of a living, breathing art. They move between formal abstraction and narrative forms, bridging the radical with the social, the political, the cultural—activating the affective force of art.
Net art was born on small screens—the 14-inch desktop monitor—and now mostly exists within the 6-inch confines of mobile devices. And yet, it has lost none of its impact. The best net art was always rebellious—in form, in perception, in how it was received. It resisted the logics of capitalism and lived intensely the hopes and fears of the coming networked age. Today, we inhabit an algorithmic regime: networked surveillance capitalism, extractive systems accelerated by war, preserving narcissistic freedoms for the few at the top of the hierarchy.
Art, however, still holds the power to shape identities—to lay the foundation for a new, more just society. Perhaps no single genre can carry this potential alone. But the fusion of gallery and club, of image and sound, opens a different kind of space: one that might offer joy, ignite hope, and momentarily dispel the fog of loss and loneliness.
Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps it’s a new beginning.
net artists
Amy Alexander's computational artwork spans installation, performance, and online media. With background in film, music, and expanded cinema, she was one of the early artists working in the development of generative net art beginning in the mid-1990s. In addition to her work under her own name, she has developed tactical media projects as Cue P. Doll and performed nightclub visuals as VJ Übergeek. She was a co-founder and longtime moderator of the software art repository runme.org and an early member of the TOPLAP live coding collective. Amy is the developer/maintainer of The Mary Hallock Greenewalt Visibility Project, an online database dedicated to making the early 20th century inventor’s physical archive materials available online to researchers worldwide. Amy has written and lectured on software as culture, audiovisual performance, algorithmic bias, and media preservation. She is a Professor of Computing in the Arts at University of California, San Diego. Amy’s projects have been performed and exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum, Prix Ars Electronica, Transmediale, SIGGRAPH, NIME, CURRENTS, International Conference on Live Coding, and the New Museum as well as nightclub performances at venues including Sonar and Minneapolis’s First Avenue. She has also performed on the streets of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, Zürich, and Aberdeen, Scotland.
Vuk Ćosić is a canonized classic of net.art and a co-founder of the nettime and Syndicate mailing lists as well as the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab. He has exhibited in many well-known galleries and museums, and has lectured in several dozen art academies while, apparently, withstanding the test of time. He refuses to run his life like a business, but his work is being written about, quoted, imitated, and even collected. His basic education as an archaeologist combined with an avant-gardist ethos has provided him with both the long view and rapid bursts of passion necessary for working in the critical media arts. He sometimes writes about himself in the third person.
Constant Dullaart (NL, 1979) is a former resident of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and lives and works in Berlin. His works were shown in MCA, Chicago; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Victoria & Albert Museum London; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Import Projects, Berlin; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; ZKM Karlsruhe; Frans Hals Museum, and MAAT Lisbon (among others)
Sarah Friend & Arkadiy Kukarkin ⣿ Sarah Friend is an artist, researcher, and software developer from Canada and currently based in Berlin, Germany. Her work explores games, economics, and the self via engagement with emerging technology. As an artist, she is represented by Galerie Nagel Draxler and has exhibited at and worked with MoMA (NYC), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Kunsthaus Zürich, HEK (Basel), Haus der Kunst (Munich), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), bitforms (NYC), Albright Knox Museum (Buffalo), Rhizome (NYC) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) among others.
JODI is a Belgian-Dutch artist collective of net artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. They have been working with and on the internet since 1994. In 2014, they received the Prix Net Art. Their work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at: Documenta-X, Stedelijk Museum, ZKM, ICC (Tokyo), CCA Glasgow, Guggenheim Museum (New York), Centre Pompidou, Eyebeam, FACT (Liverpool), IMAL (Brussels), and the Museum of the Moving Image (New York), among others.
Olia Lialina is a Net Artist, born in Moscow, one of net.art pioneers, animated GIF model. Co-founder of Geocities Research Institute and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Archive. Writes on New Media, Digital Folklore, Vernacular Web and Human Computer Interaction. Professor for new media and art and design online at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart.
Jonas Lund (1984, Sweden) creates paintings, sculpture, photography, websites and performances that critically reflect on contemporary networked systems and power structures. His artistic practice involves creating systems with parameters requiring viewer engagement, resulting in performative artworks executed according to algorithms or rules. Through these works, Lund examines issues of digitalization such as authorship and agency while questioning art world mechanisms. After earning degrees from Piet Zwart Institute and Gerrit Rietveld Academy, he has held solo exhibitions at numerous venues including The New Museum, Whitechapel Art Gallery, and The Photographers' Gallery, with work featured in group exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, ZKM, and the Stedelijk Museum. His works are included in major public collections worldwide and has been extensively covered in publications including Artforum, Frieze, and The Guardian.
Joana Moll is an artist and researcher exploring how techno-capitalist systems shape interactions between machines, humans, and ecosystems. Her work focuses on Internet materiality, surveillance, interfaces, and energy, and has been shown at major institutions including the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, ZKM, MACBA, and Ars Electronica. It has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Der Spiegel, and National Geographic. She co-founded the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR and has held fellowships at the BBVA Foundation, Weizenbaum Institute, Disruption Network Lab, and Critical Media Lab. She is a professor at KHM in Cologne.
Everest Pipkin is a game developer, artist, and educator whose work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology, tool making, and fantasies of collapse and isolation– as well as the labor, maintenance, devotion, and collective care so often present in those fantasies. They produce printed material as books and zines, as well as digital work for the browser and in game engines. They also make drawings on paper.
Sebastian Schmieg works in a wide range of media including video, website, installation, artist book, custom software, lecture performance, game show, and delivery service. His work has been exhibited internationally at KW Berlin, Kunsthalle Zürich, The Photographers’ Gallery London, HEK Basel, and Chronus Art Center Shanghai. Schmieg is a professor for interface design at HTW Dresden. He is based in Berlin.
Miyö van Stenis is an artist and curator currently based in Paris. Through performance and coding she explores Internet interfaces, operating systems, software and computational devices. Her interest is in the error and the limit in the human and machine interactions. A number of her projects focus on the socio-political crisis in Venezuela. Her curatorial practice engages critical approaches to post-internet aesthetics and new media/technologies and includes livestream channel DeOrigenBelico (since 2010), Beautiful Interfaces: The Deep in the Void as part of The Wrong Biennale (2014), and Beautiful Interfaces: The Privacy Paradox (co- curated with Helena Acosta, currently on view in Reverse art gallery as part of Creative Tech Week New York, 2016). She is a founding member of the activist group: Dismantling the Simulation.
Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman ⣿ Igor Štromajer, a non-amateur electric non-artist – “le Pavarotti du HTML” – explores tactical a=tF², intimate guerrilla, and traumatic low-tech communication strategies. He has exhibited his work in over three hundred exhibitions across more than sixty countries, in numerous galleries and museums worldwide. His works are part of the permanent collections of several art institutions, including Le Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. ⎚ Brane Zorman is a composer, sound, and radio artist. He has created numerous sound works for theatre, dance performances, new media, and internet projects. He has developed a particular interest in uncovering the unseen, unheard, and hidden presence of sound, vibrations, radiation, and plant communication. Employing both analogue and digital technologies, field recording, and various techniques, his work spans the realms of music, multimedia, and spatial exploration.
Deutsche Version des Ausstellungstextes
Diese Netzkunst Gruppenausstellung ist Teil der Bright Night, einer panke.gallery SoundNight. Bright Night, verweist auf die Tagundnachtgleiche, jenen Moment des Gleichgewichts, in dem es weder hell noch dunkel ist, sondern etwas Dazwischen. Ein Zustand der Ambivalenz fragil, flirrend, irritierend und enervierend. Gerade in Zeiten, in denen sich gesellschaftliche Diskurse immer häufiger entlang scharfer Trennlinien bewegen, scheint es umso dringlicher, Räume für das Uneindeutige, das Widersprüchliche offenzuhalten. Und doch braucht es auch Grenzen, ein klares Nein, eine Linie, die nicht überschritten werden darf. Diese Spannung zwischen Offenheit und Abgrenzung, zwischen Freiheit und Verantwortung durchzieht die Idee der Ausstellung. Wir leben in einer Ära des Abschieds vom Überfluss, von der bequemen Ignoranz, die uns erlaubte in vollen Zügen zu genießen, ohne Maß und ohne Rücksicht. Diese Ära hat Spuren hinterlassen in uns und um uns. So haben wir uns, ob wissend oder ahnungslos, Schuld aufgeladen. Bright Night ist deshalb auch ein Raum der Trauer und der Selbstreflexion. Die Kognitive Dissonanz in der wir die letzten Jahrzehnte verbrachten muss nun ihr Ende finden. Die minimalistischen NetzKunstAktivitäten eint ihre Kraft. Sie sind intensiv, verdichtete Zeichen lebendiger Kunst. Die Ausstellung spannt einen Bogen von formalen zu narrativen Ansätzen und verbindet radikale Abstraktion mit sozialen, politischen und kulturellen Ausdrucksformen. So entfalten sie das, was Kunst vermag: eine wirksame, sinnstiftende Kraft. Im Gegensatz zu den heutigen monströs aufgeblasenen immersiven Rauminstallationen, mit all ihren Projektionen die eine Flut von digitalen Filtern und Effekten abfeuern und damit um die Aufmerksamkeit der Besucher buhlt, entstand die Netzkunst im kleinen Format auf 14-Zoll-Desktop-Monitoren. Heute wird sie meist auf 6-Zoll-Smartphones rezipiert. Doch das ihr innewohnende Widerständige blieb ungebrochen. Die beste Netzkunst war stets widerspenstig: gegen Konvention, gegen Konsum, gegen Kapitalismus. Sie träumte hellsichtig und angstvoll zugleich von einer kommenden vernetzten Gesellschaft. Heute leben wir in der totalen Netzwerkgesellschaft mit ihrem algorithmischen Regime, ihrem Extraktivismus, gestützt durch Überwachung, Krieg und eine Elitenlogik, die Luxus und Freiheit nur den wenigen Narzissten an der Spitze unserer gesellschaftlichen Hierarchien zugesteht. Gerade deshalb braucht es Kunst. Denn Kunst vermag es, neue Identitäten zu formen, neue Gesellschaftsformen denkbar zu machen. In der Verbindung von Galerie und Club, von Bild und Klang, öffnet sich ein Raum: für Hoffnung, für Gemeinschaft, für das kurze Gefühl, dass Träume noch möglich sind. Vielleicht ist das schon genug. Vielleicht ist das wieder ein Anfang.
Das Format dieser Ausstellung ist ein Experiment. Jede NetzKunstAktivität wird durch einen QR-Code auf einem einzelnen Bildschirm im Club referenziert. So können alle NetzKunstAktivitäten einzeln, in einer intimen Ansicht auf dem Mobilgerät betrachtet werden. Alternativ können wir es aber vielleicht auch gemainsam ermöglichen, sie alle nebeneinander gereit, wie in einer Ausstellung, zu betrachten, indem wir unsere Geräte mit je einer NetzKunstAktivität gleichzeitig hochhalten. Vielleicht entscheidet sich eine Besucher_innengruppe jeweils Stuarts für je eine Arbeit zu finden und zyklisch zusammenzukommen, um die Arbeiten zu präsaentieren ...oder jede_r hält einfach individuell ihr Gerät hoch, wie bei einem Live Konzert... Wir werden sehen...