Screen Play_evolution

a video by It's Our Playground
25.02.2015

Screen Play_evolution is the follow up to the show of documentation of artworks by Kathryn Andrews, Brendan Anton Jaks, Eva Berendes, Simon Denny, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Patrick Hill, Tilman Hornig, Dan Rees, Philipp Timischl, Anne de Vries we curated at SWG3 Gallery in May 2014.

At the time, the press release started like that : “ As artists we create images, as curators we believe in their potential; their potential to be seen, to travel, to expand and inspire. Thanks to High Definition, one can now see the actual colors, textures or materials of an artwork, from behind a screen. With the Internet, it is now possible to get a better idea of a show, a museum collection without even visiting it in the flesh. To be honest, we never had the chance to contemplate most of these exhibited artworks for real and this show is the occasion to experiment with a ‘Real Life’ exhibition format in the digital age.

Every artist now has to consider the ‘second life’ of his/her work. Once the exhibition is over, the work goes back into storage while its documentation starts a career online (and the photograph better be a good one!). By using some controversial and subjective selection criteria such as the online virility of the image, its visual impact, the quality of the picture taken, Screen Play reveals a primordial aspect of contemporary art production today. We find something very primitive in exhibiting images we see online each day. Playing back and forth between 3D and 2D, we re inject these documentations of artworks in their natural environment in a way to see what it does to show images of artworks within the exhibition space. Obviously, nothing can replace the sensation of seeing a work in the flesh, but could its representation create something else, something you can’t get with the actual artwork? ”

For a few years now we have been gathering images, configuring and arranging them online through a curation tool we developed on archives.itsourplayground.com. In a way, Screen Play at SWG3 Gallery could have been seen as a contextualisation of the website in a physical space.

Before it ever happen, this show was made to return to the digital sphere - not only as exhibition views - but also in the format of a video. The green chromakey walls underlined a potential projection space and evoked the inherent quality of “the exhibition background”. The walls operated as a strong and highly visible form rather than blank undecided decor.

Using borrowed and edited videos from stock footage, this piece is an experiment of the endless hybridization of the digital and challenges the idea of exhibition as medium.

Camille le Houezec & Joey Villemont
Soundtrack : Benoît Villemont / Digital editing : Thibaut @ Moderntree