The history of fake identities is tightly interwoven with the rise of the internet - the free and open space where you could be anyone you wanted to be. What role did - and do - artists play in this? How do they develop and manifest characters online? Early net artist Martine Neddam has been creating online  fake personas that work with public feedback since 1996, far before the establishment of social media. Mouchette, David Still, Xiao Qian are all characters that she created anonymously. This edition of Cultural Matter 2019-20, the audience will get to know the online curator Madja Edelstein-Gomez. The work of Neddam and Edelstein-Gomez will act as a starting point for further reflection on online identity and user feedback - and will be placed in an art historical and socio-political context. 

Madja Edelstein-Gomez 
Madja Edelstein-Gomez (1960, Montevideo, Uruguay) is an independent curator who has curated several large thematic exhibitions (Bangalore, Buenos Aires, Prague, Tbilisi, Toronto). Edelstein-Gomez currently lives in Kuala Lumpur and Paris. She is also an activist working with several NGOs. Edelstein-Gomez created a manifesto and a group exhibition that revolves around the Recombinant, a concept where artificial intelligence and artists meet. Madja Edelstein-Gomez is the collaborative creation of Martine Neddam, Emmanuel Guez and Zombectro.

Martine Neddam
Martine Neddam is an artist, researcher and teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. She uses language as raw material for her art, and many of her works center on the phenomena of speech acts, approaches to communication as well as to language and writing in public space. She has been working with virtual characters since 1996, the first and most famous one being Mouchette, a fictive thirteen-year-old that has meanwhile acquired cult status. Neddam’s virtual personae function as communications tools such that they have already facilitated the exchange between human beings via the medium of the artistic figure, and thereby anticipated the functionality of social media.

Diana McCarty
Independent media producer and feminist media activist Diana McCarty is a founding editor of reboot.fm, the award winning free artists’ radio in Berlin; a co-founder of the radio networks Radia Network (radia.fm) and 24/3 FM Radio Network Berlin; and of the FACES (faces-I) online community for women, among other initiatives. She co-initiated the exhibition Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2016, Berlin, and actively collaborates with the experimental media project Luta ca caba inda. As a cyberpunk in the 1990s, she was active in independent internet culture with nettime, the MetaForum conference series, and different hacking spaces. Her work revolves around art, gender, politics, radical feminism, technology, and media. McCarty is a BAK Fellow 2019/2020.

Cultural Matter
Cultural Matter is a series of exhibitions and events that provide a platform for the international discussion of digital art and aims to develop new strategies for the presentation and preservation of these artworks.
Also part of the Cultural Matter series: JODI, Jonas Lund, Rafaël Rozendaal, Amalia Ulman, Thomson & Craighead.
Curated by: Sanneke Huisman and Jan Robert Leegte.

Cultural Matter: Diana McCarty on A Techno-Feminist alphabet

Two invited experts, Christiane Paul (Pt.I) and Michael Connor (Pt.II), will shed their light on the work and reflect on the past, present and future of making, presenting and curating work online. 

Rafaël Rozendaal

Rafaël Rozendaal (1980) is a Dutch-Brazilian artist who currently lives in New York. His artistic practice comprises websites, installations, prints and writing and is as innovative as it is rooted in art history. His work takes shape through a range of transformations – from movement into abstraction, from virtual into physical space, and from website to print – with all of them informing each other. Open access to his websites is of great importance to him. Collectors and collections must, once purchased, keep the work online and publicly accessible. The way in which Rozendaal uses the internet in its work goes beyond the browser. The internet is his canvas, but he also brings the aesthetics of the internet to the physical and poetic space in the form of carpets, haikus and installations. 

Christiane Paul

Christiane Paul is Chief Curator / Director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, as well as Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Paul is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation's 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. At the Whitney Museum she curated multiple exhibitions and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to Internet art. Other curatorial work includes The Question of Intelligence (Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2020). Little Sister (is watching you, too) (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NYC, 2015); and What Lies Beneath (Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, 2015).

Cultural Matter: Rafaël Rozendaal

Rafaël Rozendaal is an artist who works with the materiality of the Internet. Many of his artworks are at home on the web, and deal with the context that this specific environment offers. Since 2000, Rozendaal has created dozens of generative websites, characterized by an abstract and colorful visual language. This online edition of Cultural Matter 2019-20, will present a selection of ten websites by Rozendaal that gives a broad overview of his online practice and demonstrates his interest in art history, geometric abstraction and animation. With shapes that are reminiscent of Kazimir Malevich's early abstract experiments and animations that bring to mind Suprematist compositions in motion, some of the websites seem indebted to the early experiments with abstraction of the Russian avant-garde. A number of websites reflect the tension between the manifestation of digital and physical reality, or contain a pronounced degree of suppressed emotion: a work like deepsadness.com seems to be about endlessness and loss. 

Cultural Matter

Cultural Matter is a series of exhibitions and events that provide a platform for the international discussion of digital art and highlights the enduring expressive power of digital artworks: works in which art and technology and the past and the future come together in a way that is as logical as it is groundbreaking. 
	
Also part of this series: JODI, Jonas Lund, Martine Neddam, Thomson & Graighead, Amalia Ulman
Curated by: Sanneke Huisman and Jan Robert Leegte.

Exhibition 
May 6  - June 27, 2020
24/7 ONLINE

Design by Lisa Arkhangelskaya

This programme is supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts) and Stichting Niemeijer Fonds.

Cultural Matter: Rafaël Rozendaal

LIMA is the platform in the Netherlands for media art, new technologies and digital culture, where the discipline is actively questioned and where the field, and its position in society is reflected on. LIMA represents artists and supports them in the presentation and development of new work. LIMA also preserves the memory of Dutch media art through its digital repository and conservation services. LIMA is an international pioneer and centre of expertise in the fields of archiving, preservation, and distribution of media art. In collaboration with museums, artists, academies, and universities, LIMA researches and develops services and tools for makers and institutions, as well as methods and practices for dealing with digital art thoughtfully and sustainably. Our approach is anchored within a sizeable multidisciplinary network, both nationally and internationally.

LIMA

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