Montage: Unmonumental Online
Digital material is never natural. It iseither generated or repurposed, and
always pre-inscribed with meaning. It settles in sediments, turning the Web
into a veritable billboard land: a frenetic free market in which corporations, private citizens, and fictional conglomerates all wave their own signs. It is a landscape rich with fiction, contradictions, and disjuncture. The new quickly becomes obsolete, and the old is continually revived. Internet-based montage, the assemblage of distinct materials into a new whole, is therefore both an inevitable and perpetual accident and an emerging, illuminating art form....
Montage is the final exhibition in Unmonumental: the Object in the
21st Century at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art.
Launch Project 
50 50 (2007)
The Web-based video 50 50 compiles fifty amateur performances of songs by rap icon 50 Cent into seamless, uninterrupted tracks. Like a collaborative karaoake performance between culturally and geographically disparate singers, the segments-all taken from YouTube-each feature a young person rapping 50 Cent lyrics over the original song. The power of 50 50 pivots on its most basic assumption: the Web is saturated with 50 Cent performances and, on a broader level, youth are saturated with the desire to embody the values 50 Cent represents. These values are laid plain in his album title, Get Rich or Die Tryin', but the crucial aspiration not explicitly mentioned is fame: to be a celebrity, to be in front of the camera, to be watched, a widespread aspiration Laric throws into sharp relief.
Born 1981, Istanbul / Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/laric
GENERAL URL:
oliverlaric.com
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/laric
GENERAL URL:
oliverlaric.com