Jan Robert Leegte: New World at Link Cabinet

The Link Art Center is proud to present New World, a project by the Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegte created on the occasion of the exhibition at Link Cabinet. The show will be online from January 7 to February 7, 2016.

 

 

New World develops further Jan Robert Leegte’s artistic research in which the web is understood as a place to live, to explore and to reinvent. The artist combines the deconstruction of digital elements, such as selection marquees and scrollbars, with the appropriation of elements taken from digital depictions of a real or realistic landscape, as Google Maps and the videogame Minecraft. Leegte dissects these elements for their aesthetic and sculptural properties, creating art works that redefine our relationship with the space and its digital representation.
New World is a random digital landscape to travel and to explore, based on a geometrical abstract composition that reshapes the Earth landscape from a digital perspective. The interaction, even if reduced to the minimal game mechanic of navigation, leads us to discover a world that is at the same time always new and similar to itself: a digital maze endlessly and randomly generated while we explore it.

 

Jan Robert Leegte started working as an artist on the Internet in 1997 and has been a contributor to the renowned surf club Nasty Nets. As an artist he tries to explore the position of the new material put forward by the (networked) computer. Selection marquees, scrollbars, Google Maps, code and software are dissected for their sculptural properties. His work have been presented at many museum and galleries including: Whitechapel Gallery (London), MOTI museum (Den Bosch – NL), iMal (Brussels), 319 Scholes (NY).

 

Link Cabinet is a single web page hosting solo shows where artists exhibit a single, site-specific artwork. Conceived as a white and neutral exhibition space with an essential interface, Link Cabinet is a blank space that will be transformed by the works on display. After the show, the projects won’t be available on the site anymore. Link Cabinet is a project by Matteo Cremonesi for the Link Art Center.

 

The Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age (Link Art Center) is a no-profit organization promoting artistic research with new technologies and critical reflections on the core issues of the information age: it organizes exhibitions, events, conferences and workshops, publishes books, forges partnerships with private and institutional partners and networks with similar organizations worldwide.

 

The Link Art Center is proudly part of Masters & Servers. Networked Culture in the Post-Digital Age, a European adventure focused on a new generation of digital interventionism, awarded with a Creative Europe 2014 – 2020 grant. Up to August 2016, Masters & Servers will explore networked culture in the post-digital age.