MARK CALLAHAN
Folk Forms No. 1
House and Universe
Reverse E
1968
24 Hour Miss South Carolina
Cloud Salsa
Internet Soul Portraits (I.S.P.)
Excursions
American Trilogy
One
Vanishing Point
Real
Chewingum
Cameo
Prints
Reverse E

Project link: http://mazamedia.com/irl/

Reverse E
2009

Reverse E is an animated GIF that restores a depiction of Elvis that appeared in countless black velvet paintings back to its source, an iconic image from the 1973 "Aloha from Hawaii" concert television broadcast. The work was created as part of the Club Internet residency during the In Real Life exhibition at Capricious Space in Brooklyn, New York.

Club Internet founder Harm van den Dorpel created an assignment for invited participants during the exhibition to "(De)Mystify the Inner Workings of a (Hypothetical / IRL) Artwork or Phenomenon by applying the Principle of Reverse Engineering."

Curator Laurel Ptak writes:

The exhibition IN REAL LIFE invites the people behind innovative and independent online art initiatives to each come do a 4-hour residency inside a gallery space, attempting to explore how the distribution, production, analysis, and consumption of culture are rapidly evolving in an online context. In particular the show aims to render the labor of these online practices transparent, providing "real life" access to these cultural producers, and overall inspiring public dialogue around their practices.

The 14 participating websites — Art Fag City, ASDF, Club Internet, Ffffound, The Highlights, Humble Arts Foundation, I Heart Photograph, Loshadka, Netmares/Netdreams, Platform For Pedagogy, Private Circulation, UbuWeb, VVORK, Why + Wherefore — represent a wide spectrum of online practices and practitioners. Among them are: online curators and critics, internet surfers, bloggers, artist collectives, and much more. These sites, and others like them, represent a truly expanded field for the discourse of contemporary art. Often they show us work, viewpoints, and voices missing from more established, "real world" venues. Overall they have pioneered forms and frameworks that offer us new ways to see, think about, and participate in contemporary visual culture.

The exhibition title IN REAL LIFE derives from the texting/chatting acronym IRL. This interplay between the forms of the digital world and those of the physical world is a concept explored in endless ways throughout this exhibition. For example: the catalogue and website designs are one in the same — while normally print and onscreen publications have markedly different specifications, demands, conventions, and expectations — here their differences have been conspicuously ignored to create a feedback loop between the two.

Also consider the installation, which features participants working on their websites as they would normally do privately, inside a public context. Bringing their laptops and belongings from home, they work at a desk in the center of an otherwise empty gallery space and their desktop activities are both projected large-scale onto the gallery wall and published online. While some websites have created special projects for their 4 hours inside the gallery space, some will just go about work as usual on their sites. In either case, a crucial aspect of the exhibition is its viewing public who are greatly encouraged to stop by, chat, ask questions, and act as active participants IN REAL LIFE.

In Real Life
Club Internet
"In Real Life" at Capricious Space : A Conversation on Rhizome