Since 2019, Digital Salon Leipzig has been an informal association of twenty local artists who explore current digital technologies and their social impact in their work. A one-hour programme presents works from recent years, insofar as they have been created as videos; other formats such as installation or net art are to be presented in the future.
The one-hour video programme has two thematic ideas:
On the one hand, the artists explore visual production on social media and how the influence of algorithms and attention-orientated platforms has changed cinematic storytelling. The works shown are often conceived for YouTube and as series, a reaction to the cultural lockdowns of the Covid pandemic. Through humorous appropriation, they register the general shift in attention production from the exhibition space to social media. With a wink, they use fictional scenarios and can be read as reactions to newly created formats of cultural expression: Influencers, unboxing and explainer videos. On the other hand, the new labour and social conditions of post-digital reality are examined: The possible dissolution of the nation state, the perpetuated production of data by human subjects, the relationship between work and laziness in the face of the promise of the machine replacement of labour and, finally, the environmental resource of water required for chip production. The videos will be shown in English or with subtitles.
Participating artists with their videos:
- Charlotte Eifler: Pattern Thieves
- Elli Kuruş: History of Political Operating Systems II – Territory and Border and History of Political Operating Systems – Summary
- Francis Hunger: Dataproxy Trailer and Dataproxy II – The Data Toilet
- Gabriel S Moses: The Arrangement – A true crime wedding video
- Marie-Eve Levasseur: Unboxing Another Otherness III – Technological Body Care
- Melina Weissenborn & Verena Looser: Landscape of Absence
- Stefan Hurtig: Idle
- Su Yu-Hsin: Particular waters