Being Social

About

Being Social is the opening exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park in North London. Furtherfield has established an international reputation as London's first gallery for networked media art since 2004. With this exciting move to a more public space Furtherfield invites artists and techies - amateurs, professionals, celebrated stars and private enthusiasts - to engage with local and global, everyday and epic themes in a process of imaginative exchange. This exhibition brings together artworks by emerging and internationally acclaimed artists: Annie Abrahams, Karen Blissett, Ele Carpenter, Emilie Giles, moddr_ , Liz Sterry and Thomson and Craighead. Liz lives in England. Kay lives in Canada. Liz has been following Kay's blog for a while. Now she knows enough about Kay to build an exact physical copy of her bedroom and a lot more. Annie has asked women of different nationalities to meet on their computer screens to communicate their anger in front of their webcams until there is no anger left. Jon and Ali are listening to a collective stream of consciousness of people all around Finsbury Park, gathering their Tweets to print out and paste onto the new gallery walls. The people at moddr_ wanted their real-lives back so they have built a machine to help them commit Web2.0 suicide, deleting their social media profiles. Karen is an open, free and public multiple-personality and invites you to BE her. Ele and Emilie are inviting people to join groups around the world in embroidering — word by word — a shared lexicon of terms about the Digital Commons. Since the mid-90s computers have changed our way of being together. First the Internet then mobile networks have grown as cultural spaces for interaction - wild and banal, bureaucratic and controlling - producing new ways of 'being social'. Visitors are invited to view art installations, software art, networked performances and to get involved with creative activities to explore how our lives - personal and political - are being shaped by digital technologies.