The Eternal Network

From a queer feminist wiki platform to a critical atlas of the Internet to a supercomputer that recommends absurd geo-engineering scenarios to overcome the climate crisis: The Eternal Network exhibition questions technological and social networks in the light of contemporary urgencies. How can the digital space be decolonized? How is information sharing conceivable beyond platform capitalism? How reliably can networks still provide answers to future models of sociality, technology and ecology today?

Based on Fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s 1960s concept of the Eternal Network, the exhibition presents a reference system with terms, quotes and images for the development of network cultures. Selected network culture projects from the 1990s to the present are presented in a series of revisions. While the idea of the Eternal Network anticipated new forms of exchange in an increasingly global world, these critical network cultures similarly speculated about cultural practices related to the new web infrastructure and post-globalized society. By connecting Filliou’s Eternal Network, critical network cultures and contemporary art, the exhibition closes the gap between the pre- and post-Internet eras. In view of network backlash, it examines the legacy of critical network cultures to find out whether and how they can continue to have emancipatory importance in the future.

With works by, among many others, Johanna Bruckner, Luiza Prado de O. Martins, GUO Cheng, Louise Drulhe and Bahar Noorizadeh