TERMINAL 4.0: Anti- Social Media Desearch Repartment

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Desearch Repartment, "State of Exceptional Webnation," 2016

Launch Event: Friday, March 31, 7pm

Grand Luxe Hall, Western Front

Free Admission

TERMINAL 4.0

Anti- Social Media Desearch Repartment

TERMINAL is a four-part installation project that examines single user interfaces, and the influence of technology on the adaptation of new artistic forms.  The project addresses itself to an idea of what different hardware units, operating systems, and user environments have offered to artists and to the viewers, readers or users of their work.  Each iteration of the project considers a touchstone in computer interfacing. Conceived as an exhibition in four parts, the project utilizes a single-user space at Western Front – our former ticket booth/reading room – to offer an intimate viewing experience that works away from the traditional spatial paradigm of a white cube.

The final iteration of TERMINAL will feature the launch of State of Exceptional Webnation as the future of social media and citizenship. Users are invited to be a part of this revolutionary online nation-state by joining Desearch Repartment as they define a new paradigm at the intersection of social media, futures and creativity at stateofexceptional.com

Western Front Media Arts Program announces the upcoming launch of SOE (State of Exceptional) Webnation, a new online platform by Desearch Repartment.

Desearch Repartment has found the solution to #alt-2017™: with a trump of the will they birthed a new nation-state on the Internet. This immaterial and borderless online nation is an alternative to utopia, and everyone is invited to apply for citizenship!

Through ongoing engagement with the SOE Webnation, users will see the bizarre and terrifying state of the world through a lens of acceleration, where politics, media, and art are revealed as codependent networks of Neo-Lived Realism. Wordplay and witty text will propel the user through games, quizzes, decorated selfies, user-generated content, art collections, emoji chat, and embodiment exercises while also filtering users through a secret algorithmic ranking system that will help some to accumulate more status while others find their standing and access reduced. The two-sided coin of privacy and invisibility benefits or disadvantages the user based on their performance and is always in a state of flux.

Navigating the site means engaging in all our favourite online activities that bring us together as a community: memes, chatting, and watching videos, not to mention gaining friends and earning status, all while keeping up with the impressive algorithms. Users enhance their communication by expressing themselves exclusively via emojis, and their online presence begins to reproduce itself all on its own through extreme use of the site. As they make and collect art and connections they gain ever more power and status, and are on their way to becoming nanobots, clones, holograms, DNA archives, or simulated reality – perfect versions of themselves, and perfect slaves to the system!

In the most extreme makeover ever SOE Webnation revamps the art world and the prison industrial complex by merging these institutions as the Institute for Durational Futures, or the IDF. Through online instruction in YAGA (Desearch Repartment’s contemporary spiritual embodiment practice that takes from yoga, performance art, and self-torture) prospective citizens will execute immaterial labour and cultivate their durational compassion, making them ideal followers, captive nation-builders and metadata artworks unto themselves at Desearch Repartment’s creative prison, the IDF.

As America’s most famous painter George W. Bush proclaimed, “You’re either with us or you’re against us” and with Donald Trump’s global Mobius fence we can be both at the same time!

Join us at Western Front to celebrate the website launch: Friday, March 31, 7-10pm

Desearch Repartment will host the workshop: SOE Creative Prison Solutions: alt-2017™#ThinkFastDieLess @learn2sayyes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ on Sunday April 2, 2-5pm.

Workshop capacity is limited, please register at mediaaassistant@front.bc.ca