[Nettime-nl] FAITH IN EXPOSURE - EXHIBITION AND SEMINAR

[Marieke Istha <istha@montevideo.nl>]

FAITH IN EXPOSURE

EXHIBITION AND SEMINAR

24 February – 17 March
Opening 23 February, 17.00 – 19.00 hour

Beirut Letters, De Geuzen, Govcom.org, Lynn Hershman, Olia Lialina & 
Dragan Espenschied, Avi Mograbi, Sean Snyder, Thomson & Craighead, Jody 
Zellen

Nanette Hoogslag / Oog (Volkskrant):Jimpunk, Graham Harwood, Micheal 
Magruder, Laure Ghorayeb, Rob Hamelinck & Nienke Terpsma, Kessels 
Kramer, Jeroen Kooijmans, Jochem Niemandsverdriet, Max Kisman, Tjebbe 
van Tijen, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukacs, Lust: Thomas Castro, 
Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen, Jeroen Barendse, Willem van den Hoed, Han 
Hoogerbrugge, Occulart: Geoff Lillemon, Jody Zellen, Motomishi Nakamura, 
Jonas Ohllson

Curated by David Garcia

This exhibition and seminar addresses the central narrative of western 
democracy our 'faith in exposure', the unquestioning belief that the 
circulation of knowledge through news media (and other means) constrains 
the powerful and guarantees democracy. In a world where we may know but 
are still compelled to obey, Faith in Exposure is a platform for artists 
and researchers to ask whether it is still tenable believe the central 
myth of the information age; that knowing the truth shall make us free.

SEMINAR
Saturday 24th of February
13.30 – 16.30 hours
With Jodi Dean, Noortje Marres, Richard Rogers, moderated by David Garcia

The seminar accompanying the exhibition Faith in Exposure will take 
place on the 24th of February. It will begin with a key-note 
presentation by leading US political and media theorist Jodi Dean. 
Dean’s book “Publicity’s Secret“ approaches (according to Slavoj Zizek), 
the key issue of critical theory: “how are we to subtract the authentic 
democratic impulse from its perversion in the media manipulated notion 
of public and public support”. Part of Dean's book involved looking for 
sites of resistance even in odd places like UFO and conspiracy theories.

For the seminar Dean has prepared a talk which deepens her interrogation 
of the ways in which conspiracy theories operate in the public domain. 
Entitled Popular Credibility, the presentation will address matters of 
certainty and conspiracy theory around 9/11 and will involve showing and 
analysing portions of a video that has been circulating the Internet 
called Loose Change.

Also present at the seminar and acting as respondents to Dean’s 
presentation will be Noortje Marres and Richard Rogers, two important 
Amsterdam based theorists who have both, in different ways, challenged 
dominant notions of the ‘public’ and rethought our conceptions of how 
democracy has changed since its fate became entwined in the Internet.

Reservations: info@montevideo.nl, +31 (0)20 6237101
Entrance 10,- ( students 8,-)

EXHIBITION

Our goal with this exhibition is to temporarily transform the 
Netherlands Media Art Institute into a center for what the artists 
collective De Geuzen call “multi-visual research”. Not only a gallery 
space alone but an “art and knowledge workshop”.

This is why the Amsterdam University research network Govcom.org have 
occupied the Netherlands Media Art Institute recently on the basis of a 
temporary residency. During these weeks they have been working with 
their specially developed web-crawler application to investigate 
fluctuating alliances between political issues and celebrity 
endorsements. Govcom.org’s installation will focus on the case study of 
the Heather Mills and Paul McCartney saga and uses this instance to ask 
whether the link between celebrities and issues can be dismissed as the 
‘politics of distraction’ alone.
The installation Global Anxiety Monitor, the artists collective, De 
Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) deploys Google’s 
multi-lingual image search functions to look at the way different key 
words raise the anxiety temperature of different cultures including 
Arabic, English, Hebrew and Dutch, monitoring the ebb and flow of global 
anxiety.
Sean Snyder is a self confessed news addict. A shortwave radio 
enthusiast who grew up with cable television, a remote control, and a 
computer. He works with basic consumer computer applications, Final Cut, 
QuickTime, Photoshop, enabling him to re-watch, slow down, and enlarge 
images. With a high-speed Internet connection, a satellite television 
receiver, and accounts with the Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC 
Snyder has slightly enhanced access to events and reports. Since Sept 
2001 he has used these resources to pursue his preoccupation with the 
way media events are subject to different forms of reconstruction, both 
textually and through images. “I am not so much interested in the 
politics (although I have my opinions) and/or the “truth” behind the 
reporting of events, but more the question, to what degree can visual 
art approach and potentially provide a different perspective on reading 
such events?...Maybe my question is, hasn’t news become entertainment? 
By definition, entertainment is contrary to so called “reality,” which 
is supposed to be represented in the news. If entertainment is something 
that feeds on our unconscious, does this mean that we increasingly see 
our own fantasies projected on screens (in this case, through globalized 
consumer items) with the appearance of objectivity? Finally, what do 
these images reveal?
Oog is a remarkable experiment in which the major Dutch national 
newspaper De Volkskrant has opened a space in its on-line edition in 
which each week an artist is commissioned to make visual commentary on 
the news. The project has existed for 18 months and is one of the most 
visited pages on the site, outside the news-pages. From the extensive 
archive Oog’s initiator and curator Nanette Hoogslag has made a small 
selection of pieces to resonate with the Faith in Exposure theme. The 
contents are made accessible though a specially created interface by 
Joes Koppers and Bente van Bourgondiën.
The Beirut Papers is an soul scorching video distributed freely on the 
net during the Israeli incursion into the Lebanon in 2006. A powerful 
example of how the subjects of the news can take control of the 
instruments of representation and dissemination.
Avi Mograbi is an internationally acclaimed documentary film maker. An 
Israeli himself he goes into areas of conflict in Palestine and uses his 
camera and the journalistic role not only to record events but 
occasionally to provoke them. He frequently confronts highly charged 
political and emotional issues head on. His work is an eloquent 
repudiation of the idea of news gathering must be cool and ‘objective’.
Jody Zellen is an artist of remarkable sensitivity who mobilizes a range 
of visualization tools to engage with highly charged news material in 
ways that allow for new spaces of subtle reflection and engagement.
Thomson & Craighead’s installations take to an extreme the notion that 
the news has become little more than a narcotic. They take the notion of 
a visual narcosis to an extreme by deploying the visual paradigm of the 
ticker-tape news feeds that run along the bottom of the screen on 24 
hour news channels and transforming them to an extravagant baroque spirals.
Lynn Hershman's latest heroine is DiNA, an artificial intelligent robot. 
DiNA is candidate for 'tele-president'; a virtual presidential candidate 
with a brain as big as the Internet, and growing smarter as she 
processes information. DiNA responds to the concerns of her 
constituents; her 'mind' shifts through tidal waves of information on 
the web to form concise opinions on issues ranging from abortion to gun 
control. DiNA is a socially intelligent and aware agent capable of 
evaluating news events and relaying them immediately to users.
Olia Lialina was one of the earliest exponents of net-art a practice in 
which the contextual and aesthetic possibilities of the Internet were 
explored in a series of remarkable pieces. Lialina is also a both keen 
historian and an amused commentator on the evolution of the web. In the 
pieces shown in Faith in Exposure she exploits, together with Dragan 
Espenschied, the paradoxes of the news paper cover as an interface in 
the era of screens and networks.


Netherlands Media Art Institute
Montevideo/Time Based Arts
Keizersgracht 254
1016 EV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
T +31 (0)20 6237101
www.montevideo.nl
info@montevideo.nl

The exhibition Faith in Exposure is open Tuesday through Saturday from 
1:00 - 6:00 p.m.; also open on the first Sunday of the month. Entry: € 
2,50 (1,50 with discount)
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