cultural matter

Can contemporary art - and the production thereof - be optimized and automated? In 2013, the artist Jonas Lund made a solo exhibition based on this simple yet critical and challenging question. The Fear Of Missing Out, held at MAMA, Rotterdam, would become a landmark exhibition in which the algorithm played a leading role, a show that was of great influence on his later work. The works produced for The Fear Of Missing Out were not the direct result of Lund’s labour and ideas, but made by a computer algorithm written by him.

The internet is dominated by controlling and selecting (and censoring) structures and algorithms. Dutch artist Harm van den Dorpel questioned how he as an artist could intervene in these structures, and built a complete up and running digital social network Delinear.info. With this work, van den Dorpel wants to undermine the dominant linear structures which are central to the feeds of mainstream social media.