AI #11 Painting

Space is starting to move, it changes to a space of streams and needs to be rethought. The actual works of Gabriele Walter are researching the invisible and untouchable information spaces of the World Wide Web, created of endless chains of 0 and 1. The internet is the first global net, that is able to include all other cultural nets, as it might appear. After the first dream of an democratic, inclusive and individualistic medium, already since a while a major change of it has begun. This change of the internet even seems to attack democracy at his heart. Has the slow mutation from the self-determined human, as the promise of the first days has tempted, to an external controlled human already started? Filter bubbles are created, by webpages that are trying to predict with algorithms, which content the user would like to see. Based on tracking information of the user, only content will be proposed, that fits to what she/he believes. New ideas, themes, important information are going to be hidden and the impression is getting created, only those things exists, that fit to the self interest of the user. The danger is, that the civil discourse is getting undermined and that people are getting opened to propaganda and manipulation. Internet has started to become an ideological medium, as it embeds its users in many little combos and the tracking history is throwing an invisible net over our access to reality. Nets are nets as they do not cover areas or fill spaces. They are standing out to the in-between, which is a non-net. Those spaces, which are not defined by the net itself, are decisive for the net. The in-between is no bad place. Open spaces that preserves diversity and allows tolerant discussions about values, needs to be saved in digital age. Art can make a valuable contribution to this. The artist Gabriele Walter develops, within her translucent acrylic glass works, transmitted by paint and tapes, dematerialized, hybrid spaces, that appear like frozen stills, by mixing analog and digital techniques and creating with light a play with reality and virtuality. The collages of found traveled tapes, with their pictograms symbolizes the information streams of globalization.