With The Tech Oracle in spring 2015 the series of the exhibition projects startet, in which the both sister companies, constant, Brussels and esc medien kunst labor, Graz, examine and use the Internet as potential place for art production and social reflection.
During the initial phase of the Internet, the networking existed in an effectively peripheral growing infrastructure, which needed, enabled and presupposed collaboration at the same moment. This collective character of the network embossed art and culture of this emerging virtual place with intersections in different, equal functioned worlds, which had been generated by phantasy. The basic concept was the entanglement of different knowledge and experience with the ambition to gain insight into the present. Soft- and Hardware have been construed, to permit the collective as well as the individual principle. Concurrently with the development around Web 2.0 (almost) exclusively the individualisation of the user as well as the monopolisation of the infrastructure have been aided. The reason of this fact ist that the individualised principle can be seen as the default-adjustment (the "norm"), while collective forms indeed still are available and possible, but they rather exist in the background. The project scrutinises these developments and externalises utopian and dystopian qualities of the Internet by dint of a critical method of approach.
In spring 2016 the concept of 'I don’t know where this is going' will be developed together within online meetings, during the first project phase from February to June 2016, in dependence on the first implementation 2015 (The Tech Oracle). In June 2016 the new concept will be permuted at Gallerie IMAL; Brussels. In the process the artists are able to make use of the whole material of The Tech Oracle.
In autumn 2016 esc mkl becomes place of reflection for I don’t know where this is going. Together with art historian Anne Laforet and artists of the project I don’t know where this is going will be introduced in Graz. The approach from The Tech Oracle and I don’t know where this is going will be merged on a theoretical level.
