Future Now Exhibition

‘We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us’ - Marshall McLuhan (1964)

All paradigm shifts in art emerge in response to social change and technological innovation. In the last 15 years information technology, particularly the emergence of the internet, has began to touch, and often reshape, every sphere of our lives. It is the electronic inter-connecting network potentially linking every human being directly to every other human being on planet. As human beings we are essentially social constructs – that is we are defined by our relationship to others – any fundamental shift in these relationships mediation is a fundamental shift in what it is to be human. It has been argued that the emergence of the internet is either A) the biggest technological innovation since Guttenberg’s movable type printing enabled the reformation, the scientific revolution and the birth of modernity B) A system as transformative as the very emergence of the written word in Mesopotamian 4th BC, or even C) a biological shift in human kind on a scale of the emergence of language itself. Therefore we are currently living through an age of technology-lead social change so all encompassing that we are presently unable to grasp the full implications of what that change may mean, other than to state simply that this social change will inevitably lead to a fundamental change, not only in what is meant by the term 'art', and what it is to be an 'artist', but what it actually means to be a human being in this emerging post-Gutenberg galaxy.

Future Now is an online exhibition featuring 5 emerging artists working with digital print, video projection, sound performance, text, digital programming, and drawing . This exhibition will create a dialogue with the monumental technology-led social/cultural shifts that have emerged in the last 10 to 15 years focussing on our changing relationships with technology and each other within the birth of the information age.