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 
Internet Group Shot (2006)
Guthrie Lonergan's Internet Group Shot (2006), draws on the formal conventions of amateur group portraits, and amplifies those conventions on a more massive scale. In Lonergan's extensive Web surfing, the artist noticed that the Net is heavily populated with group portraits, most of which tend to share the same properties and subjects arranged in similar formations and poses. The Internet Group Shot brings these people together in what purports to be a collective snapshot of the Internet. Scrolling over the individual pieces of this massive portrait causes them to pop up, emphasizing the fact that the image is made up of a series of juxtapositions that add up to a much broader (albeit tongue-in-cheek) gesture.
Born 1984, Los Angeles, CA / Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA Guthrie Lonergan's work approaches home computing as pop culture. He questions his own excitement for the freedom of DIY culture -- specifically the democratic spirit of the Internet -- highlighting the web's most mundane personal content to create work that feels both refreshingly humble and depressingly dismal. He focuses on the preset defaults of consumer-level technology (iPhoto slideshows, YouTube videos, etc.), and how these establish a foundation of banality for home-made culture. Relying on these presets, he approaches the Internet from the most basic user's perspective. His role is half artist, half Internet surfer. Most of his work is exhibited on his website, http://TheAgeOfMammals.com. He is also a co-founder of the Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club.
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/lonergan
GENERAL URL:
theageofmammals.com
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/lonergan
GENERAL URL:
theageofmammals.com