MAAP: OUT OF THE INTERNET
As soon as you walked in you knew that ‘Out of the Internet’ was not a regular white cube or black box media arts exhibition. Artistic Director Kim Machan structured the 2006 MAAP experience around a mezzanine floor composed entirely of construction scaffolding extending into the eight metre high ceiling of the elegantly rebuilt State Library of Queensland. What could have been an uncomfortable and confronting spatial anomaly to unsuspecting audiences instead provided both the perfect metaphoric and pragmatic framework for this seriously ambitious multi-nodal exhibition.
This architectural intervention served many purposes. Firstly in its not so subtle referencing the history of net art—looking back to the early days of Internet Art when web art sites were littered with ‘Under Construction’ graphics as artists taught themselves how to code. Secondly, according to Machan, the practical use of construction equipment in the exhibition space ‘reinforces a physicality and polemic contrast to the transient light of electronic media’. And lastly, but most importantly, by making gallery visitors climb a rather precarious set of stairs leading up to a slightly bouncy platform it reminded us that the internet has been situated in the art world for over a decade as Unstable Ground.
However, once you realised that it was quiet safe to go up the stairs it became pure fun. Both Baby Boomers and Gen Xs alike could not help themselves from exploiting the flexibility of the floor and grooving to the rhythm of Korean artists Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ internet delivered flash animation Out of the Internet (and into the night). Young-hae Chang and Mark Voge, superstars of the media art world, have delivered yet another hypnotic karaoke style work with repetitive... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline