Keywords: Remix, recombination, recycling, rewriting, reenactment, date, reinterpretation, free version, remake, copyright, “copyleft”. Distortion, reengineering, detour, reformulation, “hacktivism”, cache, serendipity, found art, exquisite corpse, shared authorship, recirculation, wiki.

This exhibit opens the second phase of the Netescopio project. It focuses on a recurrent practice in artistic productions on the web: the reappropriation and reuse of symbolic materials. Unlike with other technological media, digital media makes possible not just reproduction, but manipulation as well. Instead of invariability, perpetual mutation. Rather than copying, remixing. This has introduced a series of reflections not only regarding the notion of originals and copies – concepts whose meaning fades away in the digital realm - but also regarding ideas such as authorship, possession and collecting.  

The works which make up this selection share this practice of reappropriation and reuse, but employ it via different strategies. We will see works which remix and recombine materials to yield new creations, and others in which the original work is respected while a “free version” of it is recreated. There are others which employ material on the web or websites to parody, sabotage or manipulate them, distorting their messages. We will also find artists who operate like collectors, turning their computer’s cache into a kind of involuntary wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, along with other works based on the recirculation of information and interaction as necessary mechanisms for the creation of meaning. The artist’s role on the web will no longer be that of a creator, but rather that of a "redirector" of information.

Gustavo Romano