“Postdigital Ecosystems” BabyCastles New York. 2016.
Curated by Helena Acosta, Andrea Wolf and Joe Salinas, features works by art collectives Refrakt and Exonemo. The exhibition explores how the increasing digitalization of our everyday life, marked by the emergence of various new visual manifestations and the constant flow of data from and into our multiple screens like smartphones, computers, televisions, and billboards. These new dynamics have taken on their own lives becoming a seemingly autonomous ecosystem. We are connected even when we are offline, and whereas ubiquity used to be a quality of gods, it now seems to be a demand for mere humans in our networked society
The works in “Postdigital Ecosystems” look at the exchanges between the physical world and the digital world, questioning the boundaries between our biological reality and the technological virtuality. Exonemo and Refrakt examine how the lines between the physical world and the ether of the web are moving and blurring, while visualizing the overlaps between the digital and the analog. We might even wonder if the physical world is becoming an interface to the digital world.
The paradigm shift in technology has changed social values as well as every aspect of our ways of perception. Whereas there used to be an obvious difference between reality and virtual reality, these boundaries have started to blur and converging into eventually will make way to one big mixed reality. With smart technology and artificial intelligence has found its way into our homes and most intimate fields of our life, its overall role in society changed. In today’s world of constant connectedness, logging out has become an irregularity. We not only consume information and content but very actively participate, interact and generate more content. The user has become a participator. The exhibition puts the viewer in the spotlight while visualizing the ubiquitous digital space.