Biennale

For the first edition of the Internet Pavilion, Manetas and Aman invited to Venice a number of people involved with the activist website ThePirateBay.org to inaugurate the „Embassy of Piracy“. Just a few hours after the press-statement of Padiglione Internet was released, the administration of the Venice Biennial began receiving calls from the Berlusconi Government ordering from them to cancel the invitation of ThePirateBay.

Just recently, all art that deals with computers directly, became data itself. It started referencing other data and lost its status of "Avant-garde".

Biennale

The Island of Internet & BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer, an exhibition series created by Rafael Rozendaal) The artists are invited to bring their own machines and projecting on any space that they can grab. Its a desperate attempt to open a few windows of fantasy and creativity over a heavily nested "real space". BYOB is one of the few original expressions-even if its somewhat of a grimace- that are still possible to be achieved with visual arts. Its the scream of our extended bodies, while trapped between computer keyboards and the unnatural light of the computer projectors. Artists: Agnes Bolt, Alterazioni Video, Andreas Angelidakis, Angelo Plessas, Anna Franceschini, Billy Rennekamp, Boris Eldagser, Britta Thie Claudia Rossini Cristian Bugatti Elisa Giardina Papa Emily Jones & Sarah Hartnett (, year of the Hare) Giallo Concialdi Hayley Silverman Interno3 and crew Iocose Ivano Atzori Jaime Martinez Jeremy Bailey Les liens invisibles LG Williams/Estate Of LG Williams Luca Bolognesi LuckyPDF Marc Kremers Marco Cadioli Marisa Olson Marlous Borm Martin Cole Matteo Erenbourg Mike Ruiz Miltos Manetas Nazareno Crea Nikola Tosic Parker Ito Pegy Zali Petros Moris Priscilla Tea Rachele Maistrello Rafaël Rozendaal Rene Abythe Riley Harmon Sarah Ciraci Tele Ghetto Haiti Theodoros Giannakis Travess Smalley UBERMORGEN.COM Valery Grancer Wojciech Kosma Yuri Pattison

After having sailed together with the PirateBay in 2009 and after having conquered the island of San Servolo in 2011, the "Internet Pavilion" is now based in the old Oratory of San Ludovico, a holy church from the XVI Century. On the bare walls of the little Chapel, Miltos Manetas realizes a cycle of oil paintings inspired by the devotional paint work of the Venetian Renaissance. However, if Vittore Carpaccio - for example - in the Scuola di San Giorgi has glorified the gestures of St. George who killed the dragon, the Greek artist chooses a totally different kind of holy protectors for his Church. Patron saints of the Internet Pavilion are in fact the Unconnected: those people who indeed still live without an email or social network account, miraculously immune from internet dependency.
In an age like ours, where the border between real and virtual has collapsed, the digital Unconnected seem like real monks or holy men who – voluntarily or not – are detached from the world through an ascetic practice, being free from the chaotic flow of images and information. To show them how life works in the era of smart phones, between 2.0 vices and multimedia paradises, there is a “Tintoretto style” painting by Miltos Manetas, portraying the postures and behavior of those who come in contact with the web. Astonished looks, fixed on small mobile phone screens, or the expression of thinkers filmed by the laptops webcams, animate paintings of various sizes which, set up in a sacred space, recall both the polyptychs or the altar pieces as much as the opened tabs on a computer desktop. To know who the Unconnected really are is not easy. For this reason the power of the network has been challenged. A recruiting campaign has been launched on Facebook during the 2 months preceding the opening of the Biennial. The social network users have been asked whether they knew people who weren’t online and requested to advise the Internet Pavilion staff about their first names and surnames. Quickly a series of identities from various profiles was formed: from the parents of very popular bloggers to famous singers and showmen. Among the Unconnected there are, for example, Luigi Ontani and Enzo Cucchi, two of the most well known Italian artists, or Donald Knuth, computer technician and emeritus professor of the Stanford University, who at a certain stage of his life decided to repudiate Internet.
The list is clearly still incomplete. In order to evoke the spirit of the Unconnected inside the pavilion, some participants will act in the exhibition space on the opening day and in the following months. Particularly the bharatanatyam dance expert Marianna Biadene and the computer engineer Pasquale Fedele, who specialize in neuron interfaces. The borderline meeting between contemporary dance, ritual and brain control, under the sign of painting, will give life to a lyrical moment, unique and one-off, which will distance the audience from the expository bulimia typical of the Biennale to be transported to a contemplative dimension of inner peace. The multiform results of the III Internet Pavilion are collected in the exhibition’s catalog. The publishing is a special edition of Solo, the monographic magazine edited by AcM Collezione Coppola: a precious element to decode the history and the symbols of this Internet Pavilion 2013. The research of and about the Unconnected will then continue in unpredictable ways thanks to the collaboration with Nero Magazine. Produced by: Associazione E, AmC, Nuova Icona, Collezione Coppola Media partners: Gloria Maria Gallery, NERO, My Art Guide, Lightbox, UP3 Architetti Associati, Liquidweb, Drago Publishing.