Now, desktop & file system metaphors are disappearing and we use our own devices as our gatherings. After some decades of placemaking, corporations have become sordid answerers to the desire for connection. Centralized social networks become the primary spaces we congregate in, almost no different to the density of mall culture I experienced in urban Manila where privately-owned public spaces are the norm. It’s not the prettiest picture: the sense of community in an internet cafe with several signs up saying “NO MASTURBATING ALLOWED”, but we gathered around it, anyway. It was in this time that the internet felt closest to a medium for connection, rather than the sole place where connection was transacted in itself

-- thinking about bringing connection and gathering back to the web, idea for using IG as a space to gather

Could artists’ websites disrupt or shape the contemporary image economy, the current state of visual culture on the internet which is defined by hypercirculation, over exposure and low attention spans

as of February 2016, 486 Instagram photos are uploaded every second. That’s over 40 million images a day

Rather than images of the work, we get images of the work in a building; rather than an expansion of the ways art circulates online, it is an expansion of the tried-and-tested commercial model

Art – like all cultural production – has a complicated status online. It becomes ‘content’, that catchall phrase for the stuff that advertising is sold around

This might read like a list of service providers, but it shouldn’t: these are the structures through which contemporary art is viewed today

The answer to all of the above is that while we think we see a lot of art online, we are lost in a sea of images
It’s a requirement not only in order to build such a platform, but also simply to be able to imagine what is possible when working online
...But rarely do they facilitate access to the non-tech-savvy, be they artists who may want to work with them or viewers trying to understand the technique.