WYSIWYG, And Other Things You Can Buy On eBay

WYSIWYG is a group show asking artists to consider how their practices with technology and digital media are also implicitly embodied in material and infrastructure. There is a tendency for digital art to imagine itself untethered from the material world, free of the market's usual demands on physical objects. Yet like a mind without a body, the digital is meaningless without mediation by the physical technology or infrastructure by which it is experienced. By placing digital artworks for sale on eBay, the show further exposes how a platform's infrastructural logic mediates and produces the object it purports only to sell. Some artists embody their work in a shippable object: a USB stick, a desktop PC, a microcontroller. Others hijack the listing itself, its images, HTML, and server infrastructure, as the work's true material. At both extremes, the show argues digital art is never immaterial, but entangled in a global economy of material extraction and platform capital.

Participating Artists:#

Benton C. Bainbridge • Peter Burr  • Chris Coleman  • Alexa Crouwers • Bridget DeFranco  • Exonemo • Mark Fingerhut • Matthew D. Gantt • Sarah Grant • Dev Harlan • Yifei He • Konstantina Mavridou • Zsolt Mesterhazy • Michael Neff • Motomichi Nakamura • Taezoo Park#