ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The website is a vessel, monument, home, cathedral, container. It breathes, reflexes, rejects, crucifies, dreams. We click, consume, inhabit, determine, dream.
Website as Subject is a dual exhibition featuring Chia Amisola and Yehwan Song, web artists that unravel and reconstruct the notion of the website. Together, they piece sites that imagine the infrastructural as architectural, redetermine defaults and the placement of home, and playfully weave through space, spirituality, and the all-enveloping surrender of the internet.
Accompanied by performances and public architecture, the website is the default material of the new public — a realm that is all of scaffolding, subject, society, and surrounding at once, and just as easily none of it. Amisola and Song’s websites intrude, intervene, interact, and collapse altogether. New aesthetics, languages, engagements, and religions are formed: websites will rot as chaotically as they appear just to disperse, they are unexpected—what is human-constructed becomes human-averse. They are atmospheric, questioning, autopoietic, regenerating, decaying, and urgent. More than something topical, the website as subject is a condition: a sickness, a subjugation.
ARTISTS
Chia Amisola (b. 2000) is an internet & ambient artist from the Philippines. Their (web)site-specific art posits worlds & tools where creation is synonymous with liberation—investigating technology’s love, labor, and liberation. Through ‘internet ambient’, their work is situated in the internet’s ecologies, its politics of visibility, defaults, and infrastructures—to make an internet where we can be heard.
Yehwan Song is a Korean-born web artist who specializes in the creation of anti-user-friendly, non-user-centric, unconventional, and diverse independent websites. Yehwan’s work satirizes and critiques the overgeneralization of users and the prevalence of templated websites. The primary focus of Yehwan’s artistic endeavors lies in exploring the discomfort and insecurity experienced by marginalized users hidden beneath the facade of technological utopianism, excessive comfort, speed, and ease of use. Through her practice, she tries to address digital discomfort stemming from a lack of consideration for diversity and a dearth of empathy.
Through the act of exposing this discomfort and crafting non-generic web interfaces, Yehwan aims to shed light on the inequalities pervasive within the digital environment. The body of artwork created by Yehwan Song encompasses a wide range of mediums, including virtual web spaces, physical installations, web tools, and user interfaces.