Right Here, Right Now

About

Right Here, Right Now brings together 16 international artists who use and explore digital technologies. Together they address how technology affects our lives - be that through surveillance, artificial intelligence, voyeurism or online dating.

Created in the last five years, their critical, playful and illuminating artworks challenge our understanding of the digital systems that surround us, while making visible those that are hidden. Many are interactive, while others transcribe data into stunning visual displays or strange music. All invite us to re-think our own increasingly connected and systematised lives.

Exhibition highlights:

·         German innovator Robert Henke creates a living visual artwork of beauty with a randomly programmed laser installation

·         Manchester-based Mishka Henner merges images of oil fields sourced from Google Earth to address matters of surveillance, ownership and environment

·         UK digital art pioneers Thomson & Craighead demonstrate that a computer virus can be aesthetic with their animated installation Corruption. Another work, Stutterer, transcribes the human genome into photo images taken from the internet and lasts with a duration of more than 60 years

·         Timo Arnall’s room-size immersive film installation of a Spanish data centre reveals the hidden infrastructure of the internet, and the very physical spaces needed to create the ‘cloud’

·         Branger_Briz’s A Charge for Privacy tests our comfort with permission by letting visitors charge their mobiles in exchange for copying photographs from visitors’ phones, and sharing them with new gallery audiences

·         Daniel Rozin’s kinetic Darwinian Straw Mirror artwork allows playful interaction through an Xbox Kinect motion sensor which places the public within the artwork

·         Sergina’s performances explore post-physical gender identities and sexuality on the internet

·         Sound-artist Ed Carter creates a music score from the atmospheric data collected within The Lowry 

·         Upcoming talent Felicity Hammond explores printing processes and digitisation on architectural scale with Restore to Factory Settings