chat is this real
live gallery surfing session with Maya Man & Aram Bartholl
gallery surfing
About the event
Join us for a live Gallery Surfing session at panke.gallery with NYC-based net artist Maya Man and Berlin-based media and concept artist Aram Bartholl as they browse the web together. The artists will talk about their practices, showcase current projects, surf their favorite websites, and share their open tabs and personal desktops.
chat is this real is a meme referencing a typical interaction between an online streamer and their "chat" – an unspecified, anonymous, yet always present entity. It alludes to the confusion and anxiety of what some call the post-truth, AI slop era, while also hinting at the entertainment value that same confusion can generate.
In their art, Maya and Aram explore the realities that form on and through the internet. They examine online economies, social media, and current technologies, as well as their aesthetic, personal and societal implications. Having participated in the early developments of AI applications – from glitchy GAN-generated animations, random text generators, and face filters to the currently highly developed AI models that generate sophisticated videos from single images – Aram and Maya share the experiences they have gained by using these tools and reflect on the effects they’ve had on their own artistic practices, as well as the online and offline environments they inhabit.
As both Maya and Aram have been at the forefront of bringing net art into physical spaces, they will also share insights into the curatorial formats they have developed: from Aram’s speed shows and one-night group exhibitions on phones – one of which recently happened at panke.gallery – to Maya’s sacred screenshots, taken from the phones of 20 artists and exhibited at her project space HEART in NYC.
At panke.gallery, both artists will share the space and their screens.
Come surf the net with us!
…and don’t forget to visit the gift shop on your way out.
Event Series
Gallery Surfing is an event series where we go online to browse and discuss different net art activities with artists who are shaping the net art space. Past sessions have included Jan Robert Leegte, Joana Moll, Annet Dekker, and Sebastian Schmieg among others.
Live at panke.gallery & streamed online here
Artists
Maya Man is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. Her websites, generative series, and installations examine dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self online. She is the creator of the browser extension Glance Back and the Art Blocks curated collection FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT. She has exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; bitforms, NYC; SOOT, Tokyo; Verse, London; HEK, Basel; and Feral File, online. She has been invited to speak on her work at The New Museum, NYC; The V&A, London; and MOCA, Los Angeles. Her artwork has been featured in Art in America, Document, Vogue, and Dazed among other publications. She organizes a curatorial project called HEART, previously run out of her studio in SoHo. She is online at mayaontheinter.net.
Aram Bartholl uses sculptural interventions, installations, and performative workshops to question our engagement with media and with public economies linked to social networks, online platforms, and digital dissemination strategies. He addresses socially relevant topics, including surveillance, data privacy and technology dependence, through his work by transferring the gaps, contradictions, and absurdities of our everyday digital lives to physical settings.
Bartholl has exhibited at MoMA Museum of Modern Art NY, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Palais de Tokyo, Hamburger Bahnhof, Seoul Museum of Art and the Thailand Biennale among other as well as conducting countless workshops, talks and performances internationally. Aram Bartholl is a professor for art with digital media at HAW Hamburg, he lives and works in Berlin.
https://arambartholl.com