The internet is both pluralistic and policed. From this premise, HTTP.PARADISE speculates on the terms of digital paradise through radical perspectives in video art, the moving image, music videos and video gaming. Curated by Jake Treacy and presented online via Incinerator Gallery, the exhibition is a direct response to cancelled artistic opportunities and physical distancing, positing the digital as a space to explore contemporary politics, autonomy, spirituality and identity. The exhibition’s composite title, HTTP.PARADISE, prefaces the search for paradise online as one marred by antithetical and incompatible personal and societal states of being. As such, the exhibition presents a series of video works that engage digital technologies to confront the very question of how the virtual, as a pervasive lens through which we navigate the world, defines identities and justifies disempowerment.
In the wake of a global health crisis, there is a literal disconnect between the gallery, the artwork, the artist and the audience. Consequently, the exhibition cannot be considered without a discussion of the interface—the screen that now sits between the audience and the exhibition. On the one hand, the current institutionalisation of the screen feels like a coping mechanism for the artworld’s losses: the audience defined by proximity, the comfortability of objects in space, the illusion of professional security. On the other hand, the digital emerges as a disruptive force to imagine alternate connectivity and disrupt power structures outside of, and in opposition to, the institution. HTTP.PARADISE does both, offering a double speculation of the future: a speculation of the nature of collectivity in a world connected solely through virtual means and a speculation of the future of exhibitions themselves.
Hester Lyon is a writer and arts worker based in Melbourne.
