This week’s new exhibitions
Work by boredomresearch, showing as part of Current in Preston.
Current: An Experiment In Collecting Digital Art, Preston
The relatively recent genre of digital art has caused something of a quandary for collectors, in that it’s insubstantial on the one hand and infinitely reproducible on the other. This show, sampling the work of an array of contemporary digital artists, including James Coupe and the slightly provocatively named collaborative duo boredomresearch, aims to provide what sounds a rather sobering “pioneering practical case study in the collection of digital art”. The work, however, covers the expanding range of our electronic landscape and is far from academically stultifying, taking in randomly generated film clips, a universe populated by endlessly self-fertilising whirligigs, a display of the steadily diminishing number of oil barrels supposedly left in the world, and a covert surveillance set-up that samples visitors’ identities as unwilling actors in a restaging of Harold Pinter’s 1962 play The Lover.
Harris Museum And Art Gallery, to 4 Jun
Robert Clark