Cathy's Art Diary

Small exhibition at Tate Britain which asked four emerging artist to look at the effects of the internet by comparing attempts to quantify the wealth of data to tangible objects. I loved Eloise Hawse’s film of her father being scanned alongside the animation it produces. It was amusing because he was scanned fully dressed and she showed it with a 3D print out of his shoes. It was an interesting intense but detached view of someone she loves, or that’s how I read it. I also liked Charlotte Prodger’s full sized print of the x-ray of a lorry at customs! Yurl Pattison presented a film of a formed defence centre which is now used as a datacentre. It was shown imagined online posting from a 2030 time traveller. I didn’t really understand Katina Palmer’s Island of Portland with three photos and an audio story. It was interesting but I didn’t see how it fit the brief.

Small exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in which seven contemporary artists give a critical appraisal of the World Wide Web 15 years on from its invention. Jon Rafman presented a series of Google map images, tidied up and presented as an archive. Some of the images are odd an unexplained such as a man lying in the street with his head propped up on the pavement. Erica Scourti kept a daily diary which she sent to herself on Gmail them in a video diary reads out the adverts which appear next to the email. This translates her words into another diary form which remotely define her personal traits. Liz Sterry sought to reproduce a bloggers world from their blog and built a reproduction of their room from what she could distill from their online presence.   Some interesting idea which made you think about what the internet has done to our lives both good and bad. Review Evening Standard