Artists: Zach Blas, Natalie Bookchin, Chicks on Speed, Xanthe Dobbie, Sean Dockray, Kate Geck, Elisa Giardina Papa, Matthew Griffin, Kenneth Macqueen, Daniel Mckewen, Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman
Conflict in My Outlook investigates the way the Internet mediates and shapes social relations and ideas. It highlights the erosion of boundaries between online and offline, public and private. It foregrounds the Internet as a source of both human connection and societal division, illuminating the precarious nature of reality in an era of fake news, post-truth politics, and echo chambers of disinformation.
Departing from the utopian ideals of early Internet culture to its current dystopian realities, Conflict in My Outlook examines the power dynamics embedded into the networked technologies we use every day. It asks:
What will become of our privacy in the context of data mining, Artificial Intelligence and weapons-grade surveillance capitalism? Are data rights human rights? Is there an alternative network?
Featuring Australian and international artists, this exhibition will unfold in two parts:
- Conflict in My Outlook_We Met Online is featured here until 1 March 2022
- The second part, Don’t Be Evil, will open ‘in real life’ at UQ Art Museum on 30 July 2021.
A newly commissioned series of critical provocations by thinkers from Australian and international universities will augment and expand on the exhibition’s discourses. Every few months, UQ Art Museum will deliver this fresh research, along with events and exhibition highlights, directly to your inbox via this site.
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The Internet has been described as a cloud, a network, a civic space, an archive, an information superhighway, a urinal, a supermarket, and a brothel. All are at once fitting and failed analogies. In our hyper-mediated world, we are drowning in an ocean of images and information, and data has been classified as the new oil.
Conflict in My Outlook is a response to the recent and dramatically changed socio-political conditions spawned by networked technologies. With reference to the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal that emerged in 2018, and launching amid the COVID-19 pandemic, this exhibition reveals the slippage between our online and offline lives that has never been more acute.
Image: Kate Geck, Schema.jpg 2020 , digital image
