Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, presents:

Constant Dullaart
The Censored Internet
Solo Exhibition

http://www.aksioma.org/censored.internet/index.html

Freedom of expression and the possibility to effectively turn censorship into a thing of the past has been, in the early days of the internet, one of its most seducing promises. The way its infrastructure was built, together with the seamless copyability of digital data, nurtured the techno-utopia of a world in which information could circulate globally without any restriction.

Yet, the way this infrastructure evolved and fell under the control of big corporations open to make agreements with governments in order to bring their services to an increasing number of users, turned this techno-utopia into a dystopian reality in which censorship seems as ubiquitous as data. Reporters Without Borders (RWB http://en.rsf.org, a France-based international non-profit, non-governmental organisation that promotes and defends freedom of information and freedom of the press) maintains a list of “enemies of the internet”, updated from time to time as local regulations are modified in the attempt to control the way we access information in the online environment.

The Censored Internet is an installation that collects all flags of the nations mentioned in the list ‘enemies of the internet’ published by advisory board to the United Nations ‘Reporters without Borders’ in a fully blackout room. The amount of national flags is based on the most recent report of ‘reporters without borders’, so it changes every time the piece is installed. Each flag has an RGB LED shining on it, consistently changing color with the other lights, changing the color of the room, and effectively the colours of the flags. The national colours resembling a country's identity are harder to interpret and engage with.

Continuous changing colours cause a hypnotising effect in which the visitor is confronted with a reality without national borders and identities. The intervention of the light acts as a metaphor for the necessary skills needed to bypass local limitations, and envision an utopian image of global freedom to information. A vision which seems utopian and dystopian at the same time, when the same technical skills are used to oppress people’s access to information. The old hacker mantra ‘all information should be free’ gets lost in the distraction of changing ethical relationships to technology.
A modified router is installed in the center of the room imitating a censored internet environment that only allows restricted access, and access through methods people have to use to bypass censorship and surveillance. The local wifi network will change in character each time, storing more information on the users, and censoring the internet related to local customs.

Constant Dullaart (NL, 1979), a former resident of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, lives and works in Berlin. With a practice focused on visualizing Internet vernaculars and software dialects, a political approach critical to corporate systems influencing these contemporary semantics becomes clear through his minimal and sometimes bricolaged gestures. Editing online forms of representation, and the user’s access to it, he creates installations and performances online and offline. Rather than seeking merely to write a book to be placed on a library shelf, so to speak, Dullaart is interested in animating the very concept of the library itself. His work has been published internationally in print and online, and exhibited at venues such as MassMOCA, UMOCA the New Museum in New York, Polytechnic Museum in Moscow, Autocenter in Berlin, and de Appel, W139, and the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands. Dullaart has curated several exhibitions and lectured at universities throughout Europe, most currently at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.


Exhibition opening: Tuesday, 3 March 2015 at 7 pm


Production of the exhibition: Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2015

Partner: Carroll / Fletcher, Great Britain

The Censored Internet is realized in the framework of Masters & Servers, a joint project by Aksioma (SI), Drugo more (HR), AND (UK), Link Art Center (IT) and d-i-n-a / The Influencers (ES).

Supported by: Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana