pres release

KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU
GRAND OPENING
“LEAVING REALITy behind...”

opening time: 31 august 2010, 7 pm
exhibition time: 31 august - 7 november
opening hours: tue - sun, 10 am - 7 pm
program: opening of etoy exhibition, performance by etoy, with djs etoy.STYRO and etoy.PLAY LOVE
hosted by: ministry of culture, sports and tourism, office for hub city of asian culture
organized by: platoon kunsthall e, gwangju international center
supported by: pro helvetia, swiss embassy seoul, lista office, bernina, liip



KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU is a space to previously experience the ACC aims to be a turning point of the citizen´s project HUB CITY OF ASIAN CULTURE through new cultural energy. KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU is an art project itself. The concept and program involves artists, visitors and the team to interact with each other. This creates new questions, interesting tensions and inspiring moments. As a social sculpture the art is created by the existence of this venue and its interaction with the people. It is not a white cube to display finished art pieces of international artists for mere consumption. Cultural evelopment will be experienced by new art strategies which pose questions of contemporary life and a global society. KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU will invite korean, asian and global artists to perform interaction art and develop new local aspects according to the city and citizens of Gwangju.

KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU is a space to re-define Social Sculptures in the 21st century. The concept of Social Sculptures as an extended understanding of art that has an impact on society was originally developed by Joseph Beuys in the 1960s. KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU will introduce artists and projects that connect art and society and intervene in art-related and cultural developments.

Swiss artist group etoy, which will present all its main works at KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU’s opening, is an outstanding example of an artists’ collective that constantly works on issues relevant to society, thus changing our perception of its technological and political conditions.
This artists’ collective belongs to a generation of internet pioneers of the 90s. Contrary to many now successful companies, its profile is not formed by start-up fantasies but by a hacker mentality that was driven by understanding new technologies, appropriating them and make them work in different ways. This naturally included an approach that is aware of the social dimension of technology.

Over the course of 16 years etoy has consistently pushed the boundaries of art, even turning itself into a corporation, etoy.CORPORATION, with information age longtime insider Joichi Ito as one of the biggest shareholders. The concept of actually trading shares as a company registered at the stock market could appear as an affirmative gesture towards the logics of the art market. In the light of the fact that it was a long fight with the Swiss Chamber of Commerce to get the registration of a corporation with other than financial interests approved, it rather seems to be a strategy questioning the fundamental meaning of cultural value and the conditions of its exchange.
etoy’s projects are technologically sophisticated yet accessible to the public. They often invite to participate and become integral part of their work. In etoy.BROOD project, kids are not educated about art, but integrated into the production of art. However broad the conceptual range of etoy’s projects is, they are all aimed at intervening in relevant techno-cultural discourses of their time.

Looking at etoy‘s body of production up until now, it is probably not exaggerated to say that etoy is one of the most cutting edge art collectives of our times that work in the field between art, technology, and society. Its projects are designed to push conceptual, academic and technical boundaries and to have an impact on important issues in technologically advanced societies. etoy‘s strength lies in combining critical reflection of contemporary technoculture with technologically advanced solutions to address neuralgic points.
Already in 1996 etoy infiltrated global search engines like altavista, infoseek and lycos, digitally hijacked internet users on a massive scale, thus demonstrating accessibility to the internet on a level beyond interfaces designed by corporations. This impressive demonstration of hacktivism as a tool for (re-)appropriating the WWW not only brought them The Golden Nica at Ars Electronica 1996, but also international recognition for etoy as a relevant art collective. The digital hijack affected 1.8 million users and re-directed them, without their knowledge, to a website installed by etoy. The project pointed out that subversion in the internet-age not only requires understanding weak points of power structures but also advanced technology, which is more and more inseparable from the social sphere.
It was another project though that made the world realize how powerful rhizomatically organized networks can be: the so-called TOYWAR 1999/2000, which with 4.5 billion US$ etoy claims to be “the most expensive performance in art history” (etoy website). When multi-billion dollar company eToys Inc., at that time the biggest online shopping mall for toys, tried to shut down the etoy.BRAND, etoy mobilized 1799 lawyers, hackers, journalists, professors, business people and artists to fight a decentralized, playful war against the corporation. When eToy Inc. finally stepped back from their claims because of the dramatic decline of their stock market value, etoy had once more proven that the logic of communication and political action has changed, control over one’s technological skills being the basis for new forms of artistic and social action.
Since 2005, etoy is working on a new project that addresses issues still unsolved in the digital world we live in. MISSION ETERNITY deals with the questions about the relation between information, art, memory, time and death in the digital age. What happens with all the data we produce during the time of our lives, on- and offline? etoy strives to find a way to collect and secure this data – not only until the next storage media become the next standard, but as long as the global infosphere exists. For the exhibition at KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU, etoy will install a 20 feet container in the Art Yard as provocative and instable monument for the dead. The project, which involves intense research about how data can be stored securely in complex networks, has already begun with the digital remains of Timothy Leary, an early advocate of cybernetic culture himself.

Human-machine interactions are integral part of people’s everyday lives, although the communication between machines and humans are often of consumerist nature.
This is exactly where the project TAMATAR takes off from. TAMATAR is an installation consisting of 16 white  spherical objects communicating with their environment. The way they communicate is generated by digital information gathered in the MISSION ETERNITY project. Not only do the styrofoam balls interact with humans, talking to them, reacting to their movements etc. They also share information between each other and show signs of swarm intelligence. When MISSION
ETERNITY deals with a dematerialized dimension of human life, digital data, TAMATAR is a rematerialization of it – the same data extracted in MISSION ETERNITY is fed into the TAMATAR system which then becomes an even more abstract representation of a human life than digital data already is.

While each of etoy’s projects opens a world of questions about the relation of human life, both on the individual and collective level, and technological systems, it is only possible to understand etoy’s impact as pioneers between art,  echnology and the social sphere when considering the whole body of their works. Even if their way of developing and realizing projects is highly conceptual and sometimes cryptic, it always offers connection points for non-specialists to be attracted to and be drawn into their world. It is this non-elitist, open conception of art that makes etoy the perfect candidate to present its works at the opening of KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU – art as an open,participatory form of communication with society, that does not hesitate to intervene.

for more information please visit: www.kunsthalle-gwangju.com / www.etoy.com / 17cct.pa.go.kr
further press information & high resolution pictures to download: www.webhard.net / ID: christoph@platoon.org /
PW: platoon / folder: KUNSTHALLE GWANGJU