You are here

Software for Less by Ben Grosser | arebyte Gallery | 20 August - 23 October

City:

Categories:

Date: 
Friday, 20 August 2021 to Saturday, 23 October 2021
Opening: 
Thursday, 19 August 2021 - 6:00pm

arebyte Gallery presents Software for Less, an exhibition examining the cultural, social and political effects of software on contemporary society, by US artist Ben Grosser.

Software for Less will take visitors on a journey through a pseudo tech exposition. Each work is presented as a product that could have come out of an alternative Silicon Valley, interrogating and reimagining how software is created, operated, and sold. The exhibition provokes the viewer to consider the influence software has on us, foregrounding social media platforms as the main impetus; how is an interface that foregrounds our friend count changing our conceptions of friendship? Who benefits when a software system can intuit how we feel? Ultimately, questioning how software moulds who we are. 

Grosser’s work bends and rewrites the rules of social media platforms to present the viewer with new and radically different ways of interacting within this space. The show examines big tech’s fixed spaces of consumption and prescribed interaction, as well as presenting alternative ways of experiencing them that are not guided by the principles of growth and capitalism. 

Utilising custom methods such as software recomposition, techniques such as data obfuscation, and genres that include video supercuts and net art, Software For Less presents functional applications and media-based artworks that produce less profit, less data, and less users. At the centre of the exhibition is a new platform called Minus, a social network where users only get 100 posts—for life. Rather than the algorithmic feeds, visible “like” counts, and infinite scrolls employed by big tech to induce endless user engagement, Minus limits how much one posts to the feed, and foregrounds—as its only visible and dwindling metric - how few opportunities they have left. Not software for more, but Software for Less. 

Four new works have been commissioned and created especially for the exhibition: Platform Sweet Talk, Minus, and both Get Less and DEFICIT OF LESS which are in dialogue with previous successful works Get More and ORDER OF MAGNITUDE.

The exhibition further presents the existing pieces Get More, ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, Safebook, Not For You, Twitter Demetricator, The Endless Doomscroller, and Tokenize This. Go Rando and Facebook Demetricator are also included, the former having been recently rewritten for the exhibition’s opening and the latter scheduled for rewriting during its run through a series of live coding sessions.

Venue ( Address ): 

arebyte Gallery,

Java House, 7 Botanic Square

London City Island, E14 0LG

arebyte gallery , London

 


 

Follow @_artweek

 


 

 

Other events from arebyte gallery

view
Fragments of a Panorama by Murthovic and Thiruda: Opening Party
07/12/2024 to 10/13/2024
view
HOMAGE TO QUAN AM BY MARIA THAN
03/28/2024 to 05/19/2024
view
Algorithmic Unconscious
03/01/2024 to 03/03/2024
view
FOR DATA YOU ARE, AND TO DATA YOU SHALL RETURN
11/16/2023

Pages

Related Shows This Week in UK

view
Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads In and Out of Our Time
09/18/2024 to 11/29/2024
view
Sleeping Lions
09/27/2024 to 11/09/2024
view
Rediscovered Geniuses: Juan Antonio Guirado and Igor Gorsky.
10/04/2024 to 11/14/2024
view
Discovering Art with Jevan Watkins Jones
04/26/2024 to 06/28/2025
view
The Window: Aida Mahmudova
10/04/2024 to 11/30/2024
view
The Other Art Fair 100th Edition
10/10/2024 to 10/13/2024
view
WarholMania
09/12/2024 to 11/12/2024
view
Custom Patches UK
09/17/2024 to 09/26/2025

Pages