Mark as Unread: Online Publishing as Artistic Practice

Page Not Found invites two outstanding online publishing platforms, Cosmos Carl – Platform Parasite and oneacre.online, to present their current projects, discuss their leitmotiv, and address the rarefaction of public online spaces.

“Cosmos Carl – Platform Parasite” is an online platform that hosts nothing but links provided by the artist. Be it encrypted, inside an archive, available through open source software, live-streamed, downloadable, in a webshop, on the dark web, or on streetview, the CC work, although on public display, is directly accessible through the hyperlinks displayed on www.cosmoscarl.co.uk. Cosmos Carl encourages artists to reclaim (commercial) online platforms to produce and display their art. This means that the work is displayed on a website that is neither designed nor hosted by the artist. The fact that the work is made on an existing online platform implies that visitors may stumble upon it, not necessarily viewing it as art. Cosmos Carl is run by Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason.

oneacre.online is an experimental publishing and distribution project that utilises an online platform to seed unprintable text-based works by emerging artists. The project explores the possibilities of hyper-publishing in a series of four commissioned publications. Thematically oneacre.online first four commissioned publications by all female art practitioners, place themselves in the online world of constant updates and refresh buttons that, as theorist Wendy Chun observes, “exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same”. The publications use the omnidirectional online terrain and actions that are native to it — such as refreshing, instantly available to edit, easily erasable, highlighting, copy-pasting and non linear navigation — to explore and critically evaluate visions and versions of power systems by tracing the politics of technological infrastructures. Hidden in places as traditional as archives, as often used as smart phone applications, omnipresent and inescapable as the financial market and as quiet and evasive as the transfer of information in narrative structures. oneacre.online is made by Stef Kors, Titus Knegtel, and Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou.

Doors open at 20:00.