![]() Installation view.įor example, Untitled (2004) consisted of 50-100 CDRs containing download hostage videos, which had been subject to compression and other kinds of “contaminating” effects. Seth Price at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, 2004. Price’s 2004 gallery exhibition at Reena Spaulings was populated by stolen, contaminated, blurred, and otherwise degraded images and objects that evoked the larger network structure in which they circulated. “One question is whether it has been relegated to the internet, or in some way created by that technology.” – Dispersion Poster for Seth Price at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, 2004.Īs art historian David Joselit has noted, Dispersion also reflects Price’s interest in the way in which systems of production and circulation can affect images or works of art on a material level, through effects such as contamination and horizontal blur. Screenshot of news article linked from Phytognomica, extracted from Internet Archive using Webrecorder. In particular, they show that the video was often used as supporting evidence in arguments about what people thought the internet should be, and what geopolitical order it should serve. The articles sketch out a history of the transit of this video file through the network of its time. Screenshot of Phytognomica, extracted from Internet Archive using Webrecorder. Links that seemed to lead to analytics or administrative information about this born-digital object instead led to news articles on the topic. It described the conflicts surrounding the circulation of a video showing the final hour of a journalist, Daniel Pearl, who was killed in Pakistan in 2003. One page on the site, titled Phytognomica, was modeled on a different mode of communication, that of a museum or library catalog. Screenshot created in EaaS using IE4.5 for Mac. Screenshot of early-2000s version of, as archived by the artist. Visit copy of Price's home page circa 2002 An early example of this strategy can be seen in the style of his website from the early 2000s, which was created in the mode of a 1990s-era personal home page, including such tropes as a visitor counter. Seth Price’s practice often involves inhabiting a given system of cultural production and distribution, and working within its constraints and formulae. It may be that we are standing at the beginning of something.” VIEW WORKĭispersion (2016 PDF version) “Production, after all, is the excretory phase in a process of appropriation. It is included in Net Art Anthology in recognition of its importance as both an artist’s critical response to, and intervention into, the workings of the net.ĭispersion (2002 self-produced booklet). Although it was deeply engaged with the net, Dispersion specifically addressed the contemporary art system, and laid the foundation for Price’s move to gallery-based work with an exhibition at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York City in 2004.Īs artists working in diverse media increasingly began to account for the effects of the network on their practice and on the gallery system, Dispersion became an influential and widely cited touchstone. ![]() In keeping with this emphasis on distribution, the work was released in various formats and versions over many years, including pages on Price’s website, widely circulated PDFs, print publications, and sculptural objects. Originally released at a time when the internet was beginning to affect nearly all aspects of culture, it argued that distribution, rather than production, was the primary way in which works accrued meaning, and that artists needed to find ways of harnessing the enormous capacity for meaning-making inherent in communications networks. Seth Price’s Dispersion is an artwork in the form of an art historical essay. The internet is for surfing, not printing.
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