Composition of the mediaspace

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It wasn’t so long ago that the composition of the mediaspace was to compress information into the smallest possible area. Initially this was an attempt to work with small pixel dimensions on those antiquated cathode-ray monitors of the 1990s and early 2000s, but at the same time, it became a design aesthetic: particularly among artists and galleries looking for that clean (often sterile), minimalist aesthetic.

Nowadays things have changed. The mediaspace sprawls endlessly into the far reaches of an essentially infinite Web. You find yourself scrolling and scrolling –  down, down, down, until you reach a “more” button – and then even farther down until you go into what appears as a bottomless sea of pixels.  This has become the New Aesthetic of the Web. And why not? Repetition is so easy, bandwidth is so plentiful, and the mouse scroller so fast and agile, that yes, we find ourselves enjoying the journey.

And that’s exactly what the mediaspace has become: a journey through space and time. We had a glimpse of this in the early days of the net with jodi.org, they foresaw the boundary-less nature of the Web, the ease of scrolling, and the sheer pleasure of that exploration. The mediaspace has become in many ways the most flexible space for staging our dreams, fears, and ideas in sweeping, broad strokes. It is also an unlimited repository for archiving visual experience, memories, sounds, and digital objects.

It is an exhibition space beyond the wildest fantasy of any curator, where the artistic can create an unbounded horizon, and the viewer can roam in all possible directions through a hyperspace of connections.