[artinfo] IOCOSE (2016) A Contemporary Self-Portrait Of The Internet Artist

[Paolo Ruffino]

A Contemporary Self-Portrait of the Internet Artist

IOCOSE are glad to announce that a new work is on exhibition from the 
16th of January at NKW in Dusseldorf, Germany, in the framework of 
the exhibition Streaming Egos. The work, commissioned by Goethe 
Institut Rom (Italy), will be part of the Italian Pavillion, curated 
by Marco Mancuso and Filippo Lorenzin, along with the works of 
Alterazioni Video, Silvio Lorusso e Salvatore Iaconesi & Oriana 
Persico.

A Contemporary Self-Portrait of the Internet Artist is a series of 
four paintings, each representing one of the four members of the 
artist group IOCOSE. The photos have been uploaded and accepted by 
Shutterstock as representing the category of 'artist'. In order to 
have their photos accepted in this category, IOCOSE gave full control 
to a professional photographer who regularly works with Shutterstock, 
and were instructed on how to hold a brush or pretend to be painting 
canvases as if they were conventional artists. Once their photos were 
available on Shutterstock, IOCOSE have outsourced the production of 
portraits representing those same photos, inclusive of their 
watermarks, to a painting service. The result is a collection of four 
self-portraits, made by anonymous painters from digital images 
uploaded on a stock photo service by a professional photographer.

The series follows from A Contemporary Portrait of the Internet 
Artist, where IOCOSE had applied the same process to a group of 
photos available on GettyImages into the 'artist' search category. In 
these two series, IOCOSE propose a series of portraits of the many 
different modes of being an artist in the internet age. IOCOSE, the 
photographers, painters, stock photo services, each represents and 
offers a different interpretation of the meaning of being artists 
today.

In A Contemporary Self-Portrait of the Internet Artist, IOCOSE 
represent themselves according to an apparently conservative view, as 
'solo' artist geniuses. However, the production process of the 
paintings has seen the collective involved only as 'internet 
artists', that is, outsourcing, browsing, uploading and downloading 
files and so on. The final self-portraits reflect on the multiple 
ways in which art is conceived nowadays, and the re-purposing of old 
skills and materials in the new digital environment.

--
Downloadable images:
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByoeRE7ZHRePeWJTaThRSUVVcm8/view?usp=sharing>https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByoeRE7ZHRePeWJTaThRSUVVcm8/view?usp=sharing


A Contemporary Self-Portrait of the Internet Artist
<http://iocose.org/works/a_contemporary_self_portrait_of_the_internet_artist.html>http://iocose.org/works/a_contemporary_self_portrait_of_the_internet_artist.html


Photos on Shutterstock:
1) 
Matteo: <http://www.shutterstock.com/s/portrait+contemporary+artist/search.html?page=2&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=333226997>http://www.shutterstock.com/s/portrait+contemporary+artist/search.html?page=2&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=333226997

2) 
Filippo: <http://www.shutterstock.com/s/portrait+contemporary+artist/search.html?page=1&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=333241634>http://www.shutterstock.com/s/portrait+contemporary+artist/search.html?page=1&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=333241634

3) 
Paolo: <http://www.shutterstock.com/s/portrait+contemporary+artist/search.html?page=1&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=333241661>http://www.shutterstock.com/s/portrait+contemporary+artist/search.html?page=1&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=333241661

4) 
Davide: <http://www.shutterstock.com/s/portrait+contemporary+artist/search.html?page=2&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=333231776>http://www.shutterstock.com/s/portrait+contemporary+artist/search.html?page=2&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=333231776


Exhibition
Streaming Egos at NKW, Dusseldorf, Germany
<http://blog.goethe.de/streamingegos/>http://blog.goethe.de/streamingegos/


--

IOCOSE
<http://iocose.org>http://iocose.org