arebyte 2020 Programme

Systems

arebyte’s 2020 programme takes the notion of Systems as its point of departure. Systems discusses the erratic interplay between the systems we encounter on a daily basis, and how we might use parts of these systems to reconfigure our understanding of the world. From global infrastructures of economics and finance, to organic and environmental systems of growth and reproduction; from computational and technological systems, to collaborative and interdisciplinary systems of discourse and pedagogy, the way our world functions will be brought into conversation, opening up a dialogue for critique and exchange.  

Continuing from the 2019 theme Home, Systems invites artists to respond to the networks and structures at play in the digitised world. The networks which have become carriers for emotional, political and ecological agendas are critiqued through group exhibitions, residencies, off-site projects and newly commissioned work.

The networks we live among are “sites of exchange, transformation, and dissemination...conveying a sense of a spare, clean materiality”*, but they’re also part of a larger world-system, convoluted and undefined through the proliferation of information and opposing agendas. These networks that have become so entangled and entwined with everything we buy, consume, read, think and act upon are broached in Systems through cryptocurrency and sovereignty with Helen Knowles; through data packets, point-to-point latency and internet protocol with Olia Lialina; through software subculture and open sourcing with Alan Warburton; through emergent technologies, creative Artificial Intelligence and algorithms with Luba Elliott; and through discourse surrounding the artist residency and intervention within the physical and virtual gallery space with Going Away.tv, Goldsmiths University Computational Arts Department and AOS (arebyte on screen).

The artists in Systems confront our current world systems of varying scales, and posit alternative ways of thinking about the underlying systems present throughout our histories, presents and futures.

*N. Katherine Hayles, ​Cognitive Assemblages: Technical Agency and Human Interactions​ (Critical Inquiry Vol 43, no. 1 Autumn 2016) p32-55