Artie Vierkant & Constant Dullaart at Extra Extra

After travelling all the way to Philadelphia to see the collaborative exhibition of the artists Artie Vierkant and Constant Dullaart it was a shock to find an empty space. The show, called ‘Less Less’, a pun on the name of the gallery ‘Extra Extra’, at first glance only consists of a room with a freshly poured concrete floor. As it turns out, the artists have created an invisible network of cables and computers underneath (or rather: in) the floor.

Visitors can use special equipment to scan the floor for its hidden content. It is bizarre to see the gallery turn into something like a crimescene while the guests meticulously search the floor like a true CSI crew.

The artists were as invisible as their work. Apparently they have no intention to return to the gallery, which they have not set foot in since the completion of their installation. They also left no artists’ statement, leaving the audience rather clueless as to their intent. The show could be a comment on the totally misplaced hype around the omnipotent ubiquity and openness of wireless networks. It could also be a representation of the network as a victim of some obscure maffia practice, in this case: the artworld. Whatever the artists’ intention, the gesture seems somewhat too literal. After the amazing work Vierkant and Dullaart have delivered individually over the past few years, this show is unfortunately rather disappointing. Maybe, like with some Internet hoax, it is not even really theirs.

Josephine Bosma is a writer and critic on net art based in Amsterdam. From an art background, she is a journalist and author in the fields of art, new media and media theory, focusing on art, sound and performance on the internet, as well as cyberfeminism and media politics.

Since 1996, she has regularly publishes texts and interviews on- and offline (nettime, Telepolis, Mute, Metropolis M, UHK, Switch). Her offline-publications include Net Art: Building Something out of Nothing in the V2_ publication aRt&D from 2005, the Ars Electronica '97 catalogue, the book cyberfeminizam edited by Igor Markovich and the book netzkunst edited by Verena Kuni.

She has given lectures about net art in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien and Stedelijk Bureau and State Academy of Visual Arts Stuttgart, and she has lectured about net.radio and sound art at Recycling the Future, Netradiodays or Futuresonic.

In 2001 Josephine Bosma initiated the newsletter for net art criticism Cream: http://laudanum.net/cream/

Her archive can be found on http://laudanum.net/bosma