The Great Conspiracy

  • Visual arts
  • Online
  • Wed, Dec 16, 2020 —
    Fri, Dec 31, 2021
The Great Conspiracy

“The Great Conspiracy” is an online exhibition of experimentation with distanced artworks, using internet communication and other distribution possibilities, but without flowing through a conventional exhibition space.

In response to the difficulties faced by the visual arts in relation to the Covid-19 crisis, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) presents The Great Conspiracy, a project coordinated by Spain’s Royal Academy in Rome that presents a space of experimentation for online artistic practices.

The works comprising this digital exhibition have been conceived and made specifically for the project and are rooted in an invitation from the show’s curators to reflect on the conditions of online contact and current forms of knowledge, with express consideration of telecommunications logics. The Great Conspiracy unveils an ensemble of pieces that operate around virtual dynamics, testing out possibilities and undraping mechanisms of communication.

This series of artistic proposals as a tool, narrative experience, website or mail experiment, set forth short circuits, distortions and homages through which to think about the uses and poetics of these technologies. Clara Montoya approaches methods of digital cartography to consider how distant places are accessed through images; Agnès Pe underscores the role of advertising in the history of the World Wide Web, overhauling one of the landmarks of internet commodification; Marc Vives remixes sound archives that circulate on the Net as an antidote to visual overload; Paco Chanivet sets out leaps between the virtual and the physical via narrative resources of speculation, suggestion and hyper-fiction; and Francesc Ruiz designs a series of materials and actions to short-circuit national mail system logistics. From divergent standpoints and strategies, this ensemble of works enables the Net’s hidden mechanisms to be viewed and experimented with, mechanisms which, in their saturation and dematerialisation, are invisible to our eye.

About Agnès Pe

Agnès Pe (Lleida, 1985) is an audiovisual artist, film director and composer. Her practice and her research work on concepts and materials beyond the limits of any genre, always with a fun and overwhelming attitude. She participates in workshops and projects with the purpose of defending the concept of amateurism, breaking with the hegemonic filmographic culture, in constant search of playfulness and under the parameters of the aesthetics of error and excess.

About TMNM

Agnès Pe has created for The Great Conspiracy: TMNM (The Most Necessary Museum). This work pays tribute to one of the milestones of the commercial Internet, The Million Dollar Homepage: a website created in the early 2000s by a young British man to finance his university career. Alex Tew devised a system for selling pixels –at a dollar each– that involved the transfer of that space on the web to advertise through an image and a hyperlink whatever the advertiser wanted, and it succeeded.

TMNM works with an equivalent system, but nothing is sold here. This new version is a website conceived as an artistic project that seeks to make artists who decide to register visible for free, with the sole condition that they define themselves as artists, without the need for anyone to establish a filter on who can enter or what it is to be an artist. Colliding with the idea of ​​success and originality that surrounds Tew’s project, TMNM offers a distorted reflection of that great myth of the World Wide Web. This is a tribute, with which he underlines certain Internet logics such as direct and democratic access to web resources, collaborative processes or the absence of filters, while debugging some current dynamics related to commodification.

Admission

Free

More information

The Great Conspiracy

Credits

Presented by the Real Academia de España in Rome with the Cultural Offices of the Embassies of Spain in Brussels, London, Lisbon and Washington, DC. and the Cultural Center of Spain in Montevideo

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