After having visited tons of online exhibitions and VR rooms, I found one show that finally made use of the digital space acknowledging its dimensional characteristics. “Piper in the Woods” (live until 15th June 2020) is an online group show responding to the pandemic organized by the art platform Isthisit?, curated by its founder and director Bob Bicknell-Knight.
The exhibition presents five videos and one sound work by five artists – John Butler, Stine Deja, Emily Mulenga, Tamsin Snow and Petra Szemán. The works look at possible futures in which technology and AI impact and govern our daily lives. As Bicknell-Knight explains in the press release, the show takes its title from the 1953 short story of the same name by Philip K Dick.
The science-fiction plot sees an army doctor, Henry Harris, examining the strange behaviour of several soldiers who, after returning to the Earth from an expedition to asteroid Y-3, claim they have become plants. With this belief, the soldiers stopped working and passed their time in the sun, like plants, meditating about how work is unnecessary and even harmful for our well-being. The story is part of the display and can be read on the left of the screen while navigating the exhibition space.
The videos are arranged to use the space horizontally rather than vertically. Thus, the exhibition occupies a space that goes outside the borders of a standard web page. The background is white mimicking both the white cube gallery space and, as the curator explains, “the soldiers’ deviation from the norm and into the unknown forest.” The only environmental feature in the room is given by the loop of “Last Resort” (2020), a sound work by Stine Deja which accompanies the visitor’s journey by offering the acoustic ambience.
The artists’ works tell the stories of individuals who, in a hi-tech world, spend their lives in solitude with no or little interaction with other humans. “Piper in the Woods” introduces us to a series of unappealing scenarios which, in this time, seems more likely to happen than ever before.
