EXHIBITIONS / REMOTE VIEWING

11.02.2010 to 06.03.2010

Curated by Claire Taylor

There is an extent to which we are increasingly becoming remote viewers: surfing the net; watching the TV, news and sports; and often emailing, texting or telephoning people instead of meeting up with them. While there is nothing new about mass entertainment and correspondence, it is arguable that many of the technologies developed with the intention of keeping us more connected with each other make us feel ever more isolated, alienated, passive and remote.
Remote viewing, in its specific usage, is a kind of clairvoyance: the purported ability to report on remote events, interactions, things, etc. that have never seen or known directly. It is a particular way of bridging or collapsing distance, specifying significance or meaning from a seemingly unlimited field of competing information in the passing present. This offers a model of artistic practice -- it is an artist's ability to show us what we cannot already clearly see that we highly value; they invite us, the audience, to participate in their vision. Perhaps this also offers a strategy for resisting something of the passivity of generic remote viewing as well.
The artists in this exhibition articulate how our view is always tied to where we are looking from -- whether these are cultural, ideological or political perspectives -- and explore different ways of penetrating the distances that are simultaneously produced, collapsed and perpetuated by mass media technologies and the hegemonies they support. In varying ways they examine limits, failures and slippages of communication and attempt to reconnect with others and themselves.

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