Catharine Clark Gallery opens its 2019 program with The Network Paradox, a collaborative project by artist Greg Niemeyer and computer scientist and artist Roger Antonsen, with Mullowney Printing, San Francisco. Realized in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Internet, The Network Paradox depicts “an animated view of the evolution of the Internet from 1969 to 2019,” as Niemeyer describes, while inviting meditation on how we form communities through technologies.
The centerpiece of Niemeyer’s exhibition is an 18-foot long gravure scroll printed from 26 plates, published by Mullowney Printing with assistance from graduate printmaking students at Pacific Northwest College of the Arts. The monumentally-scaled work on paper draws inspiration from the Daoist hexagrams of the I Ching, the historical divination text that dates to China’s Western Zhou period (1000 – 750 BC). The 64 hexagrams in the I Ching are composed through sequences of straight and broken lines that form unique compositions, representing different elements that are essential to Daoist philosophy, and that find a visual parallel in Niemeyer’s rendering of the net. In identifying these symbolic constructions as an early form of code, Niemeyer and Antonsen created a graphic composition that imagines an expanded history of the Internet and its evolution through the technological advancements of the Cold War (1946 – 1991), the first dot-com wave, the rise of big data, and the influence of artificial intelligence, among other sources and events.
Click here to read the full press release for The Network Paradox
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