The exhibition IYKYK (If You Know, You Know), investigates the shadow side of modern society. Using a cognitive map, the exhibition aims to visualize the links between information accessible through mainstream search engines, the dark web, and various offline sources. Toran Wolstencroft and the participating artists, Eli Hooper, Pedro Gossler and Anna Carpay, explore the theme through a range of media, such as tapestry, printing, metal work and film. The resulting web of information raises a milieu of questions, the answers to which may only be speculated upon. It reveals what lingers from the past, what influences our present, and what looms on the horizon – the fate of our species.
Visiting times:
March 13 – 29
Fri/Sat/Sun 12-17h
Rotterdam Art Week:
March 25-29, 12-17h
The precursor to collective revolution is collective revelation.
The technocratic billionaire bet is hedged on two pillars, two sciences aerospace and genetics : leave Earth and then cheat mortality. Become not immortal but amortal, something outside of life and death – something outside of the blue marble. This two fold bet makes sense if you want to elongate the time you have to rule. Going off world makes sense from the point of view of resource management. Was this the Sci-fi future we’d all hoped for?
Using our collective imagination to contest the logic of inevitability baked into these technocratic philosophies would be a good place to start our revelations.
Through this creative exercise in scrutinising the ontologies of the Elite we can develop our capacity to imagine a better version of our shared future. Perhaps this future looks more egalitarian, based on something fundamentally more human, striving to connect to our humanity and our core paradoxes rather than modify ourselves into beings which are fundamentally anti-human.
Perhaps our vision of the future finds strength in being the total opposite of the vision pitched by Elon, Mark, Jeff, Jefferey and Sam. If the future is spiralling towards dystopia then it is our role to imagine its opposite and create that culture accordingly.
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Pedro gossler
ARTIST: Pedro Gossler is a Brazilian interdisciplinary artist based in Rotterdam whose practice spans photography, video, and animation. His work researches memory and the archive in post-internet times, how digital cultures reshape the ways histories are recorded, transmitted, and reconstructed.
WORK: ¨the world is now under the eye of a sad science¨
The wars of annihilation newly inaugurated by Napoleon, and the centuries of violence that would follow, saw at their climax a narcoleptic Emperor.
Napoleon’s favorite green, which covered the wallpaper of his palace and the fabrics of his clothing, was made from arsenic, a toxic pigment that slowly poisoned him, ravaging his liver.
By inventing Napoleon’s green, the chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele also invented his sleepless nights and his fits of feverish afternoon sleep on the battlefield of Waterloo.
Eli Hooper
ARTIST:
Working primarily in image-based and audio-visual media, Eli Hooper is an artist currently exploring the limits of home as a physical space, the influence of digitality on memory and nostalgia, and world-building as a utopic process.
New Zealand-born and Rotterdam-based, Eli has a keen interest in how the cultural products we consume shape our experiences with the world, and what happens to our identities when these memories become intangible. Can a sense of shared, limitless belonging exist within nostalgia? Eli attempts to bring morsels from his own world to connect to those of others, finding unity in the realms between.
WORK: ¨only god knows what will happen to us now¨
is an ongoing personal exploration into the dwindling neutrality of the internet and the subsequent effect that has on popular culture and online communities. as private hegemony, algorithmic entertainment, pay-walled journalism and ai-assisted surveillance slowly spread throughout the web, the almost utopic collectivity of the internet (as well as other contemporary communication technology) has been steadily undermined. the web is quickly becoming synonymous with a global paranoia; one which arguably began in the denouncement of small-scale consumer misuse (tor, 4chan, liveleak in the early 2000s) has since shifted to the mistrust and disdain of entire platforms (as well as the governance of political bodies) and their tendency to foster addiction, misinformation, and radicalisation.
Anna Carpay
ARTIST: Anna Carpay is a photographer researching the position of the feminine body in relation to herself and surroundings.
WORK: What the hand can touch and to be touched by a hand. A play on loops of domination, have been dominated but seek power in domination.
Toran Wolstencroft:
ARTIST: Toran Wolstencroft is a Scottish artist and filmmaker. Toran explores the horrors of the human predicament and its effects on our wellbeing. Their work is motivated by a rational desire to see human society develop in a moral way.
WORK: For IYKYK Toran presents a new 2-dimensional work called ¨Bottom-Feeders¨ airbrush on carpet. The organisation of the research carries on throughout the term of the exhibition – with the drawing of the cognitive map scrawled on the windows of the space, the body of research assuming its clinical position on the tabletop in the back room.
