#1: GIFs – new sculptures of the digital avant-garde. Visual arts have entered a new era. It’s a place where immediacy rules, where visual arts becomes virtual«, promises the Super Art Modern Museum, or SPAMM for short. Michaël Borras aka Systaime and Thomas Cheneseau founded the online museum in France, albeit that geographical information is practically irrelevant in the internet era. Borras and Cheneseau present more than 50 works from the `community´, another concept that does not follow geographical frontiers. Eight of these works can now be seen at CERMÂ in two parts. The new`Digital Art Avant-garde´ discovers each other, receives and produces, communicates and grows. This is a scene that is not accessible to everyone, nevertheless extremely productive. All over the world, new artistic positions arise that evade the ›White Cube‹: animated GIFs, Glitches, web based conceptual art, three-dimensional animations. Institutions have grown around digital art, real and virtual spaces such as the Rhizome at the New Museum in New York, the MACBA in Barcelona and the Berlin based Transmediale give these positions a stage and an audience. Pixels are the material artists use to paint and shape, realizing their aesthetic visions. But can we herald the beginning of a new era, or is this just a handful of nerds who place some virtual artefacts here and there on the web? It seems quite apropos to use a commonplace cliché: one imagines pale, socially awkward creatures suffering from a lack of sunlight who sit in a darkened basement staring at brightly illuminated screens, typing furiously and moving pixels. The reason why digital art has not yet found its way into lounges, the ›white cubes‹, the living rooms of the postmodern society, may partially be explained with this stereotype. However, there is nothing wrong with being seen as a nerd. This stereotype allows young artists to experiment and can also become the material for humorous self-reflection. Jeremy Bailey, who was part of the previous CERMÂ exhibition, likes to poke fun at the typical nerd and the whole spectrum of media art. He creates pixel sculptures, which he integrates in video clips as overlays to his body and comments ironically. A guest exhibition curated by SPAMM displays tendencies within the current digital art. Four artists work in the first part of the two-part exhibition in SPAMM’s virtual project room. They all create animated GIFs and sculptures for a virtual space.

Text: Sabine Weier

Featuring work by: Emilio Gomariz, Michael Manning, Jasper Elings and Anthony Antonellis

Starts: 27 July 2012

Exhibition location: online only