Stephan Backes, Stefania Batoeva, Robin von Einsiedel, Stelios Karamanolis, Isaac Lythgoe, Yves Scherer, Yorgos Stamkopoulos

26 May – 15 July 2017

Daily Lazy Projects

Sina 6 & Vissarionos 9 (entrance)
Athens 10680

Robin von Einsiedel, Stelios Karamanolis

Images courtesy the artists and Daily Lazy Projects
Photos: Isaac Lythgoe

How do we break from these simulatory boundaries provided within this
millennial world? How can one be liberated or emancipated from the bind
of digital life. Would it be too romantic to argue that one truly only
lives on the edge when encountering the unpredictable or the uncanny, in
danger or on the brink of death? Shouldn’t life announce itself through
the dynamism of feeling, passion and the direct experience of the
present? Can this simulatory world that is rendered through the digital
supplement our new highly dazed world?
Has digitalization acted as a numbing agent against mans inhibition to be human?
For mans dependency to encounter accidents and to live a full life in the bliss of this
highly dazed world? This world we live in allows us to live in a
simulatory gaze, moving from algorithm to algorithm, from post to post.
As early as Martin Heidegger the accolade of technology has been
perceived as an anaesthetic for man, saving man from his innate
dependency to find fate and accident, instead finding binary fact and
tangible truth. Heidegger then questions our shifting position on this
planet, questioning whether we are becoming devoid of a biological
prerequisite for sunlight, storing energy through alternate forms? Has
man found a new form of digital alchemy? Is this highly digitalized
world a new formula for anthropological perpetual motion?
When placing an artwork in a gallery environment, a public space, one is
shifting the works ontological matter, thus shifting its value. The
artwork is becoming a form of consumed commodity, just like anything
else. Yet there is a difference between an artworks commodity purpose,
and other commodity purposes. Other commodities tend to have a ticking
life spans, inducing a form of ephemerality, such as buying a new
computer, a pair of Nike Air Max 95’s or even a pint at the bar, as man
is really only looking for the next best thing, a more refined model.
Yet the commodity value of an artwork differs due to two reasons:
firstly its cognitive value, whereby we acquire knowledge of a work
through thought experience and sense. Secondly an artworks value to
induce through contemplation, the archetypal ‘consumption/ destruction’
paradigm shifts whereby an artwork is not consumed in a gallery setting
yet is observed and contemplated and in most cases do not have an
ephemeral quality. This same action exists when an artwork is uploaded
onto the internet, again another form of public realm, when a work as
been uploaded it has been commoditised, placing it in a sphere where
everything happens, from purchasing a ticket to observing capital market
flows, or even watching porn, yet again all disposable actions.
Therefore in this setting artistic activity becomes ‘normal’ or
standardized, art returns to its origins as a utility purpose, refusing
to differ from anything else within the ether. Therefore within this
highly dazed world does everything just amalgamate into one form, under
the pretence of an algorithm? Have we become comfortably numb? Or is
there still space for the individual grow?

Text by Hugo Wheeler