1000 PIXEL
As we move deeper into the 21st Century SkypeLab provides a platform to explore future conversations about the role of art practice in shaping and mapping rapidly changing and increasingly sophisticated digital interfaces with their expanding social networks.
The concept for SkypeLab began in 2012 within the fractured, fragmented imaging of the then Skype technology. Skype’s creation and expansion took place in the early to mid 2000s and by 2012 it had become a part of everyday consciousness. Knowledge and identity were being challenged by endless photo and text fragments, commented on, re-formed and sent on within this new spatial experience, creating new interfaces between art practice, public space and digital technology.
Rather than pose a specific question, the SkypeLab concept is a laboratory style framework. The framework favours purposeful positioning of dialectics across long time frames and distances – art/technology, hand/ digital, here/there, day/night, summer/winter, you/me …. Within such a laboratory artists connected for the first time across screens in drawing sessions that bridged the physical and digital worlds that over time grew to become trans disciplinary street projections and performances, exhibitions in galleries, libraries, universities and public spaces, international presentations and publications over an eight year period, globally networking over 100+ people across Germany, Australia, China, USA, Brazil, Colombia and Spain. Questions arise out of the art practice itself at these points of reflection. Through such questions it is possible to map key issues and thinking within contemporary society. SkypeLab’s final iteration poses 100 Questions and 1000 Pixels to continue shaping this ongoing rhizomatic spatial map that reflects the transience, speed of connection, spatial collapse and cultural collision of contemporary everyday life experience.
Along the way SkypeLab has been supported by Reutlingen University, Germany and RMIT University, Australia as well as universities in Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Barranquilla, Boston, Hobart and Barcelona and their associated artists, curators, administrators and academics and the Goethe-Institut in Shanghai and Melbourne. In 2013 the project was awarded with the lecture prize of the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg. Such recognition plus the confidence in, and support of SkypeLab by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation has been invaluable.
Henning Eichinger & Maggie McCormick
