DIWO at the Dark Mountain

Project illustration

Private View: 7-9pm Full Moon, Wednesday 2 December 2009
Live performance at 8pm representing a central controversy arising during the project.

Gallery Open: 12-5pm, Friday-Sunday, 4-12 December 2009, 8-30 January 2010

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. – Uncivilisation, The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

The Dark Mountain Project is ‘a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption.’ It aims to ‘question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world.’ Do It With Others (DIWO) at the Dark Mountain, a mail-art project at HTTP Gallery, is a cultural collaboration for this age. “Uncivilisation,” the Dark Mountain Manifesto, calls for a cultural response to our current predicament. Its challenge was offered to network-minded artists, technologists, writers and activists as a provocation – to work together to re-envision the narratives and infrastructures that govern our relationships with the natural world, and how they might be unravelled and rewoven to reconfigure our place in it. As “Uncivilisation” concludes, ‘the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.’

Artists, technologists, writers, activists and all other living beings were invited to correspond with each other across physical and digital mail networks, and the exhibition at HTTP present the results of this process. These have been gathered and the presentation devised during an Open Curation event, involving collaborators in real and virtual space. Transmissions to be shown in the exhibition include collaborative image-threads, net artworks, digital videos, drawings, paintings on wall and paper, sound works, and the full text of the discussion generated on the NetBehaviour list presented in numerous forms. The opening will also feature a performance representing a central controversy arising during the project. The exhibition offers new myths and maps for future uncivilisation at HTTP Gallery.

The Exhibition features contributions by:
Alan Sondheim
Alessandro Ludovico
Andreas Jacobs
Andrei Tisma
Annie Abrahams
Antonio Dias
Antonio Roberts
Arn
Bob Catchpole
Brian Gibson
Crowe
Curt Cloninger
Dan Walwin
Dave Miller
Dion Laurent
Dougald Hine
Edward Picot
Fung-Lin Hall
Helen Varley Jamieson
Karen Blissett
James Morris
John Criscitello
J. Trautwein
Lauren A Wright
Lucille C.
Maja Kalogera
Manik
Marc Garrett
Mark Cooley
Mark Hancock
Mez Breeze
Michael Szpakowski
Neil Jenkins
Olga Panades
Pall Thayer
Peter Gomes
Pim Peterse
Renee Turner
Paulo R. C. Barros
Riccardo Mantelli
Rob Myers
Ruth Catlow
Simon Biggs
Simon Longo
Steven Read
Stuart
Valentin J.-A.
Vittore Baroni
Wolfgang Spaeth

This is the second Do It With Others (DIWO) E-Mail-Art project initiated by Furtherfield. The first DIWO experiment in 2007 extended the Do-It-Yourself ethos of early net art, characterised by curiosity, activism and precision, towards a more collaborative approach, using the Internet as an experimental artistic medium and distribution system to foment grass-roots creativity.

Do It With Others at the Dark Mountain is a collaborative project by Furtherfield and The Dark Mountain Project.

More about The Dark Mountain Project:

The Dark Mountain Project is curated by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine.

Paul is the author of One No, Many Yeses and Real England. He was deputy editor of The Ecologist between 1999 and 2001. His first poetry collection, Kidland, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.

Dougald writes the blog “Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job).” He is a former BBC journalist and co-founder of the School of Everything, and has written for and edited various online and offline magazines.

This project is part of Furtherfield.org's three-year Media Art Ecologies programme, which aims to provide opportunities for critical debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media art practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they engage. HTTP Gallery is Furtherfield.org’s dedicated space for media art. Furtherfield provides platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental practices in art and technology. Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery are supported by Arts Council England, London.

For details about the project, visit: http://http.uk.net/diwodarkmountain