Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Mitte

Panke.Gallery

Jan Robert Leegte: DOCUMENT PERFORMANCE

PERMANENCE

10. Dezember 2022 – 21. Januar 2023

The exhibition showcases two works from two different series – Repositions, 2018, and Window, 2022 – both made in HTML DOM, the standard document format of the web. Specifically, Repositions is an art series, while Window comprises of an NFT collection. Consequently, the exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of the HTML DOM’s capabilities and potential.

The Repositions works are investigations into the fundamentally performative nature of software. Instead of taking the web document as a static content page displaying text, images, gifs, video, etc., they have the document itself perform and can be read as document performances. Referencing Bruce Nauman’s 1968 „Wall-Floor Positions“, the works have the document take new positions in relation to the viewer and the browser’s window frame, using random algorithms to create infinite poses. The webpage, which was once the main canvas and medium for netart, has become the object itself, and with the introduction of works hosted on the IPFS, a renaissance of HTML DOM art is emerging.

Window #219 is a web-based sculpture that looks back to the mid grey computer interfaces of 1997. The use of bas-relief techniques resonates with the stone carved petroglyphs of antiquity, highlighting our desire to make the computer experience part of the material world. This is evoked further with the naming of the Ethereum programming language, ‚Solidity‘, suggesting blockchain is both software and hardware. Window #219 is one of 404 compositions generated from the script, each a fully interactive HTML-DOM sculpture, looping until the end of the exhibition.