‘Open Vice/Virtue: The Online Art Context is an exhibition and public production space featuring real-time, online collaboration and interventions in public and private spaces by software artist Andy Deck.
HTTP Gallery is pleased to present this solo show by American artist Andy Deck, as part of NODE.London season of media arts. For this, his first exhibition in London UK, Deck uses the Internet, the gallery and public space to challenge corporate control over communication, tools and software, and by extension the social imagination.
‘The giantism of media corporations and the ongoing deregulation of media consolidation (Ahrens), underscore the critical need for independent media sources. If it were just a matter of which cola to drink, it would not be of much concern, but media corporations control content. In this hyper-mediated age, content — whether produced by artists or journalists — crucially affects what people think about and how they understand the world. Content is not impervious to the software, protocols, and chicanery that surround its delivery. It is about time that people interested in independent voices stop believing that laissez faire capitalism is building a better media infrastructure.’ Andy Deck
Glyphiti is an online collaborative drawing project resented uniquely at HTTP. A large-scale projection forms an evolving graffiti wall and visitors to the space are invited to edit and add graphical units or ‘glyphs’, which compose the image, in real time. The marks made by each person, combine with others and are shown as a time-lapse image stream.
Hanging fabrics being shown here for the first time provide a tactile document of recent years’ of Glyphiti. Unlike most image software available on the Internet, Glyphiti functions through most corporate firewalls by using standard Web server requests. For the artist, penetrating firewalls acts as a metaphor to graffiti making: both activities necessitate the appropriation of privatised space for visual play.