Collect the WWWorld by Domenico Quaranta

From the blog:

The last decade has seen an incredible growth in the production and distribution of images. The availability of unexpensive production means made amateur creativity increase exponentially, while the Internet provided a new platform of distribution for this kind of production, usually kept as private so far.

In the meantime, videogames, virtual worlds and systems such as Google Street View provided this mass of prosumers with whole worlds that can be built, implemented through their own creative practice, documented and used as tools for the development of new images and new narratives.

What is the impact of this process on art practice and on the artist – in the past, the only blessed depositary of the creative gesture? Which kind of dialogue is going on between amateur practices and codified languages?

Collect the WWWorld wants to demonstrate how the Internet generation is implementing and developing a practice started in the Sixties by Conceptual Art, and further developed in the next decades in the forms of Appropriation Art and postproduction: the practice of exploring, collecting, archiving, manipulating, reusing huge amounts of visual material produced by popular culture and advertising.

However, today the mass media are replaced by a mass of mediators. Art is not responding to what they do with a more professional and technically advanced use of the same tools, but refining its own languages and codes. Contemporary artists inherited from Conceptual Art an extraordinary instrument that allows them keep and enforce their social role in the society of images and information: its ability to filter, analyze and refine the codes of cultural communication.

Thus, Collect the WWWorld is an attempt to show how art responds to the society of information.