Curator: Horea Avram
Artists: Alexandru Antik (RO), Gary Hill (US), Kinema Ikon (RO), Mihaela Kavdanska (RO/BG/AT), Yann Le Guennec (FR), Klaus Obermaier (AT), Pipilotti Rist (CH), Dilmana Yordanova (RO/BG)
MNAC Coordinator: Adriana Oprea
Error 404 is the message that internet users receive when trying to access a faulty website or a corrupted page link, a message usually followed by the phras
e “Not found”. The project entitled Error 404: Territories of Absence is a research exhibition which derives its title from this technical phrase, lending it however a rather subversive, ironic, or metaphorical meaning. Here the term “error” does not strictly signal a system failure, but rather, as the subtitle indicates, an absence, more precisely the absence of a functional and communicational territory, of information per se, whether all this might pertain to the real world (site) or to the virtual realm (website). Moreover, this absence must not be perceived as a lack, but rather as a temporary suspension of presence, of convention, of the predictable and the visible. This project takes a critical stance against the current obsession with “perfect” images and hyper-reality (see HD systems, 3D imaging, reality shows), as well as against the omnipresent preoccupation with real-time communication (4G data transmission, instant upload, continuous streaming, breaking-news), favoring and problematizing, instead, the aesthetics of error and delay, the glitch, the potential of chance and the artificiality of representation. The artworks included in this project engage with the ideas of error, blur, glitch and absence both in their concrete meaning (i.e. technical, formal, visual) and conceptual sense, as (im)possibility of representation, of communication and of bodily interaction. Either induced by the artist or the result of technical hazard, as the case may be, errors are always assumed as discourse and working strategy. Thus, the works also have a self-reflexive dimension given that they emphasize the system, the apparatus and its power(lessness). The reference to computer terminology in the title is not accidental, as all the works selected in this project were conceived and developed with the assistance of media technologies such as interactive systems, video installations, one channel videos, digital photographs, 3D prints, etc.
