STROBE

Net Gallery is delighted to present our inaugural event, STROBE.

STROBE is a project by Son Vo (Net Gallery) and Nick Zhu.

STROBE is determined to represent an alternative practice of artistic curation and expression in the context of increasingly complex technologies and the failing collector/gallery/museum paradigm. Net Gallery is a virtual gallery that has no walls, no fixed location, existing just as much on the internet as in real space.

STROBE is a one-night opening, followed by an afterparty at a TBA nearby location (link below!!).

Exhibiting and Performing Artists:

Sarah Gail Armstrong
Braiden Bellamy
Anastasia Davydova
Rod Fahmian
Isabelle Harada
Sterling Hedges
Alex Hutchiwood
Michael John Kelly
Emmett Methven
Victor Vasarely
Son
Peter Wu

Friday, January 13, 6pm-9pm
2525 W St, Los Angeles, CA 90057

STROBE
www.facebook.com/events/1841548362726237

FB LINK TO AFTERPARTY
www.facebook.com/events/1895037747391381

These days, it’s easy come, easy go.

I press the command and space buttons simultaneously on the keyboard with my left ring and middle finger, up pops a search window with the blinking ‘|’ vertical bar text cursor. I enter ‘strobe’. The matching results appear. At the very top is a bookmarked webpage made in the 2000-aughts, William Gibson’s 1993 ‘Virtual Light’. I click on it and it opens up in a browser window, where I do another search: ‘strobe’. I jump to the first of four instances, to the chapter ‘Cruising with Gunhead’ and copy and paste that paragraph:

“Rydell slung Gunhead up onto a verge covered in dusty ice-plant, doing seventy past a museum-grade Bentley, and on the wrong side at that. Eyeblink of a woman passenger’s horrified face, then Sublett must have managed to slap the red plastic plate that activated the strobes and the siren.”

Having proved my point, I click on the ‘X’ to close the window.

Now we arrive at a pit stop, Oedipa Maas in third person in Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 ‘The Crying of Lot 49’:

“Oedipa considered giving him the finger to see what would happen. But she’d driven straight through, and all at once the fatigue of it had caught up with her. The clerk took her to a room with a reproduction of a Remedios Varo in it, through corridors gently curving as the streets of San Narciso, utterly silent. She fell asleep almost at once, but kept waking from a nightmare about something in the mirror, across from her bed. Nothing specific, only a possibility, nothing she could see. When she finally did settle into sleep, she dreamed that Mucho, her husband, was making love to her on a soft white beach that was not part of any California she knew. When she woke in the morning, she was sitting bolt upright, staring into the mirror at her own exhausted face.”

We’ve traveled back in time in a way that a cut into a spool of yarn makes multiple strands, the ends marking the incision of a line of sight. Stay with me here. Along these lines form a liminality, the cut is a macro museum without walls containing ‘phatic images’ of Paul Virilio’s Vision Machine that are like blades of a propeller, that when applying the stroboscopic effect at various sampling rates, aliasing produces an optical glitch of reverse rotation or even standstill.

We’re stuntin’ one minute and the shit hits the fan the next. This isn’t a paper. It’s 1999 and Ray Kurzweil, in ‘The Spiritual Machine’ writes about art in 2029:

“Cybernetic artists in all of the arts—musical, visual, literary, virtual experience, and all others—no longer need to associate themselves with humans or organizations that include humans. Many of the leading artists are machines.”

Fuck that? Or…idk. Finally, getting closer to the present, Peter Sloterdijk in his 2009 ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’ writes (somewhat) about where we are right now:

“In the Clearing, as its most obvious marks, appear the houses of men (as well as the temples of their gods and the palaces of their masters). Historians of culture have made it clear that with domesticity the relationship between men and animals changed. With the taming of men by their houses the age of pets began as well.”

– S