Aino el Solh / FI, DE
Gradual Selfie (2014)

Originally from Finland now living and working in Berlin, Aino el Solh works across the fields of hospitality, environmental art and video. As she notes “I have spent my adult life in a more or less continuous identity crisis. My attempts of dealing with it are through my artistic practice, writing and lately conscious parenting. I would define my art as a product of an inner mechanism and a product of the Self, the ongoing project that seeks to be seen and understood”

el Solh's piece, “Gradual Selfie”, “Self Dub” and “Angel” creating an interlinking visual narrative, which explores differences between formal categorisations of the self such as passport images and Facebook profiles to more spiritual and poetic acts of self exploration.

Daniel Poláček / CZ
WebSADFaces (2011)

For the last fifteen years, Daniel Poláček has been working in the fields of photography and photojournalism.

“WebSADFaces” is a video presentation and series of printed faces taken with a webcam, while documenting erotic websites and chat rooms. Using the keyboards, Printscreen function and a webcam his screenshots specifically captured peoples dejected and somber faces during moments of their chat.

Gordan Savičić / AT
web2.0 sucidemachine (2009)

Gordan Savičić is fascinated by issues such as the creation of mega-cities and the effects of new media on subjectivity and its deep social implications.

Created in 2009, Savičić’s “web2.0 sucidemachine” was a web service, which allowed users to gain more control over the ‘death’ of their online selves. Designed to highlight the rising levels of discomfort with online social media and the extreme control companies have over our online profiles the machine enabled you to ‘kill’ your online self. The system worked as a login service, which went through your accounts, deleted your friends and posts and removed you from associated groups. Once you were dead a profile photo was issued which memorialised your “death” and published your friend count as well as the date of your virtual decease. Available for Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Linkedin, “web2.0 sucidemachine” was used by hundreds of thousands of people. As a result Facebook issued ‘cease and desist’ letters and despite the artists attempts, blocked the “web2.0 sucidemachine” servers. At the time of its inception the project became an media-art-hack performance with coverage on CNN, Times Magazine and BBC.
This will be first revival of the project since its shutdown and loss of further elements while on tour. The documentation or “Internet-road-movie” captures screengrabs of friends connection being removed one-by-one with a background soundtrack fitting to saying your virtual “good-bye”. www.yugo.at

Jeremy Bailey / CA
The Future of Marriage, The Future of Creativity (2013) and The Future of Television (2012)
Joseph DeLappe / US
Self portrait/A Dialogue (1999)

Working for over twenty years across the fields of media art, research and education, Joseph DeLappe's work spans online gaming, sculpture, performance and activism.

His “Self Portrait/A Dialogue” from his “The Mouse Series”, humorously pays tribute to Steiner’s cartoon, while simultaneously parodies the well known ‘knock-knock’ joke format. On clicking the mouse the joke plays back, bouncing from one speaker to the other: “Knock, knock”, “Who’s there?”, “Joe”, “Joe who?”, ‘Joe Mama!”.

www.delappe.net

Teresa Dillon / IRL, DE
ADIP (2009)
Rollin Leonard / US
Panty & Stocking, Cell Bodies (2013) 
Dennis De Bel / NL
Destructing (2012)
Anita Delaney / IRL, UK
Untitled (Ready for a fight) (2012)

Anita Delaney creates performative moving image and describes her work as an exploration into the ‘aesthetics of the pathetic and weak'.

“Untitled (Ready for a Fight)” is a held self-portrait, an image of a slight fighter having a fag while they wait for their confrontation to be acknowledged.

www.anitadelaney.net

Danja Vasiliev / RU, DE
Dog (2014)

Danja Vasiliev's work examines communication systems and networks through anti-disciplinary experimentation with technologies that govern digital machines and their users.

"Dog" is an Internet objet trouvé, a ready-made object spotted on Twitter and acquired via eBay.

Created by a nameless maker this iconic image of a dog fixated upon its own online avatar portrays our narcissistic desires, socio-networked and techno-political anxieties which result in self-idolizing indulgence. Fueled by uninterrupted online presence, these forms of cybernetic fetishism become the artifacts of our so-called networked lives and which in turn are radically influencing, the ways in which we think, act and control our day to day existence.

k0a1a.net

Danja Vasiliev / Sofia Mavzalevskaya
Interfaces (2003)

Created a decade ago and since disappeared Vasiliev’s & Mavzalevskaya project "Interfaces" (2003) borrowed elements from a leaked Soviet police facial-database and allowed web users to come up with alternative self-identity.

Exhibited piece is an extraction from the database containing autoportraits, nicknames and IP addresses of otherwise unknown Internet users.

Each portrait received its own unique id which became a part of the exhausting online database of selfies, the average of which was used to create homogenized portraits of the "Net Man" and the "Net Woman" of the year 2003.

In 2010 Dennis De Del established the The Dilly Dally Foundry a label which focuses on design-interventions that reflect on self-referential media art and design in a humorous and playful way.

For "Destructing" De Bel reserve engineered his own clothing, creating from the fabric a common household item, a mop. In carrying out this process he reveals the people, process and interelationships, which lie behind the construction of his own image.

www.dennisdebel.nl

Heath Bunting / UK
Self-portrait (2009)

Pioneering net artist, Heath Bunting’s ‘Self Portrait’ is a network snapshot of the artist, composed at the age of 42.

Created from a series of interlinked facts and statements such as “Born in the United Kingdom, UK”, “Conceived naturally”, to more mundane and amusing links about the artists impressions, possessions, abilities, potentials and affiliations. What Bunting's self-made list and selfie-diagram alludes to is the wider implications of the types and forms of data, which are now gathered about our persona and personal lives online.

status.irational.org

Jana Barthel / DE
KLFDF - Kater Lezmann fängt den Fisch, (2008)

Stage designer and artist Jana Barthel’s deals with the intimate, domestic and everyday details of our personal relationships.

KLFDF is a series of daily images taken over a five month period. The images were constructed by choosing a famous character, downloading the first Google image of the character and inserting the artists 'mask-like' face upon it. Keeping the original portion of each found image the augment pictures were initially published on MySpace with an accompanying time stamp and caption, relating to the image. For example "31/03/2018 Ashton and Demi are fighting for their personal rights on twitter". For the exhibition a selection of images from the archive will be printed.

www.katerlezmann.com

Jeremy Bailey is a Toronto-based 'Famous New Media Artist' whose work explores custom software in a performative context.

Within Bailey’s YouTube trilogy “The Future of Marriage” (2013), “The Future of Television” (2012) and “The Future of Creativity” (2013) the artist presents his views and commentary on creativity, his marriage, the preservation of his wife's beauty and how best to wear TV.

Kim Asendorf / DE
Kim Asendorf font (2013)

Kim Asendorf loves to transport things from the Internet into real life and back.

His font “Kim Asendorf’, which is available as a download from his website will be transferred and physically displayed in the gallery.

kimasendorf.com

Lilas Tournoux / DE
Beauty To Fail, Part 1 & 2 (2013)

Over the last four past years teenager Lilas Tournoux has developed an unique approach to filmmaking, which borders on satire and dark comedy.

The video works “Beauty To Fail, Part 1 & 2” comment on the media saturation of “make it as a pro” style modelling, make-up, fashion tutorials and beauty tips, which abound the web.

youtube.com/user/Bingpom

Olia Lialina / RU, DE
Summer 2013

Net pioneer, gif. model, researcher and mother, Olia Lialina’s piece “Summer 2013” is an online GIF of the artist distributed over 24 servers which are acknowledged as a scrolling list of names in the browser bar. As a result the image only exists if the servers are ‘on’.

For Lialina this acknowledgement of the other pays tribute to older web browser methods, where the user, the person on the other end of the line could in some ways be identified. As Lialina discusses in her text “Turing Complete User” in today's ubiquitous computing age, the goal through ‘seamless’ interfaces is to produce such a high level of comfort that users are lulled into a state of fluid transitions, rendering themselves as passive receivers, who know little about the underlying workings of the technology which they are consuming. In essence this selfie.gif, is a fragile and playful gesture, which can not exist without others, can freeze depending on the local network speed but at its heart acknowledges the central ‘on’ and ‘offline’, interdependence on each other for our existence.

art.teleportacia.org

Petra Cortright / US
RGB, D-LAY (2011)

Well known for her You-Tube and online works, RGB D-Lay features Petra Cortright using effects and filters to highlight and overplay performative memes and behaviors, which are common on across many video sharing sites.

www.petracortright.com


Rollin Leonard lives and works in Maine, Portland. His work focuses on projecting the logic, meaning or pattern from one domain into another, often using the human body as a vehicle to do so.

Panty and Stocking is part of Leonard's, The Cell Bodies series of life-size portraits. The portraits are of people he finds online and who have responded to his invitation to take part in the project. For each portrait he travels to the meet the person and take their image, which is then transferred and face-mounted on to 1x1.5  inch, clear Plexiglas squares. As the portraits are modular, each installment is always unique and different.

www.rollinleonard.com


Curator, researcher, educator and fake rapper, Teresa Dillon's work focus on the influences of techno-civic infrastructures and cybernetic attachments on our daily lives.

ADIP (Another Day in Paradise) is a collection of computer-camera selfies taken between 2008-09. For this exhibition two states were selected ‘eyes-open’ and ‘eyes-closed'. Each image is further enhanced with a series of drawn lines, while the complete archive is shredded to form a paper pyre.

www.polarproduce.org


"On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”
Peter Steiner, Cartoon Caption, New Yorker (1993)
Opening: LEAP, Friday 16 May, 2014, 19.00h
Exhibition: 17 May - 07 June 2014, 12 - 18.00h (Tuesday - Saturday)
Featuring: Aino el Solh / Anita Delaney / Danja Vasiliev / Daniel Poláček / Dennis De Bel
Gordan Savičić / Heath Bunting / Jana Barthel / Jeremy Bailey / Joseph DeLappe / Kim Asendorf
Lilas Tournoux / Olia Lialina / Petra Cortright / Rollin Leonard / Teresa Dillon
A group show with sixteen emerging and internationally renowned artists whose work humorously, poetically and critically reflects on the construction of our contemporary online identities, self-image and the implications of the ‘broadcasted selfie’.

Curated by Teresa Dillon in collaboration with LEAP
ABOUTEXHIBITION


The title of the exhibition “YOU MIGHT BE A DOG” draws on Peter Steiner’s seminal cartoon for the New Yorker in 1993, which included two dogs sitting in front of a computer with the catchphrase “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. This idiom has now come to represent a turning point in Internet history reflecting how users could send and receive messages without been identified. Although users local access points could reveal something of their persona the idea expressed in the cartoon was that essentially you could be talking to a dog as little information was given on the other person. The Internet was essentially an anonymous space. This anonymity enabled a freedom of expression, which over time has become more complex and commodified. Anonymity is now a privilege. Simultaneously the WWW has enabled thousands to tell their stories and has been incremental in sanctioning political change. As with any tool, embodied within the Internet and its architectures are possibilities, limitations and restrictions. Across this spectrum of use, the Internet has also provided a global platform for unpredicted levels of everyday, exposure of the individual. From status updates, Twitter feeds to the thousand plus online photos albums that document our lives. We have now grown accustomed to this deluge, which for some has become their de facto mode of communication. This in itself has become the qualified self in action. Self-fueled it is mediated by social networks who tap into our innate need as social animals to communicate. Within this no better counterpoint to Steiner’s cartoon is the ‘Selfie’, which in August 2013 was added to the Oxford Dictionaries and nominated 'Word of the Year'. The ‘Selfie’ is the antithesis of the anonymous user or person; constituting instead a blatant announcement of ones own image across the Internet.

The ‘Selfie’ and our various online profiles also connect to a tradition and history of self-portrait and associated theories of identity development and formation, including themes of individuality, community, narcissism, play, sexuality and gender politics. Within this context the ‘Selfie’ is not simply a throwaway pop-gesture but conjoins to our inner psyche and need for constructing and reconfirming who and what we are. In entering the English dictionary the ‘Selfie’ reveals how within less than two decades, our popular culture metaphors illustrate the complexity of how we as ‘users’ represent ourselves online. From cartoons, caricatures, avatars, social network profiles, server signatures, account names, homemade YouTube videos and self portraits - the form our representation takes within and across our techno-networks has ever been more important. Such poignant representations comment not only on the socio-techno construction of the self but also provide a lens, which paradoxically reflects how our cybernetic systems are enabling us to live in new ways beyond our biological moment of death.

This construction and performance of the self-online and its consequence is the central theme explored in “YOU MIGHT BE A DOG”. The work selected brings together practitioners, who are directly and indirectly exploring how the net inscribes and influences new narratives of self. At its most intimate this is reflected across many of the works, within which the artists image is central to the reception and creation of the work. In bringing together sixteen emerging and internationally renowned artists “YOU MIGHT BE A DOG” illustrates how our connected digital tools are providing new mirrors from which to observe and witness our emerging selves, while simultaneously provoking both tender and discomforting interpretations of what it means to be human within our cybernetic age.



Rollin Leonard / US
Arm Ball Rollin (2013) 

Arm Ball Rollin by Leonard was initially conceived as a post for cloaque.org. Cloaque operates as a kind of garbage dump of the internet, whereby the images pile upon each other to create a geological strata and continuous unbroken chain. In Arm Ball Rollin the artists arms continually repeat to form a sphere.

www.rollinleonard.com


LEAP
Leipziger Str. 63
10117 Berlin, Germany
www.xLEAPx.org

Supported by Embassy of Ireland, Berlin
EXHIBITIONABOUTCONTACT
CONTACT

Teresa Dillon


John McKiernan, LEAP
14 - 18.00h
deFacebook Session with Danja Vasiliev
Join us for this 4-hr session during which you will learn how to save and remove your images, posts and comments from Facebook, clear your Facebook history and deactivate parts of your account, which you no longer want to use or find useful. No booking required, session is free. Just bring your laptop.

18 - 21.30h
Finissage with special screening of Chatroulette: Discipline and Punish (2011) by Joseph DeLappe
Finissage: Saturday 07 June, 2014, 14-21.30h
Programme includes: