Art & Activism exhibition in Sweden

Mejan Labs has just opened Art & Activism, an exhibition featuring artists and organizations using technology to communicate a political message.

The works presented include:

vaticano.org, by 0100101110101101.ORG. In december 1998 the net artists published a spoof version of the official Vatican web site. At the time most visitors didn’t know that the Vatican, being legally a state, owns its own national domain name extension “.va”, and therefore many of them digited the “.org” one that the net artists had bought. The copy site was aesthetically identical to the real one but with slightly modified contents (for example, they added lyrics from pop music groups.) For 12 months, thousand of people visited the vaticano.org without realising the prank. At the expiring of the first year of contract, Network Solutions prevented the renewing of it.

Feral Trade where Kate Rich trades coffee over social networks. The project operates largely outside commercial channels and makes a direct intervention into the business of grocery running, using the surplus freight capacity of commuter, vacation, migration, cultural and other social movements for the underground distribution of goods. The Feral Trade Courier is an online database that helps organise shipping information, facilitate communications between suppliers, couriers and buyers, and assemble documentary product-packaging which report on the origins, transport and social connections of the feral trade product.

The artists group C6 will show Want & Need, a project where the audience can SMS their wants and needs, which will be screened in the gallery. The work asks if people aren’t mixing up they actual needs with what they want to have.

Glyphiti, by Andy Deck, is an online collaborative drawing project. Visitors are invited to edit and add graphical units or ‘glyphs’, which compose the image, in real time.