In Dreams I Walk With You

NETMARES & NETDREAMS v 2.0, an online exhibit that launched on August 8, feels like the brooding step-sibling of Harm van den Dorpel's Club Internet. Whereas Club Internet does its best to simulate a gallery's clean white box, NETMARES & NETDREAMS projects its content into an alternating background of white or black, set beneath a ghostly, reverberating browser frame with links delineated via a somnolent parade of sibilants: z Z z Z z Z z. Each page presents a single work by one artist; the total curatorial effect is one of dark confusions, subterranean logic, and primal unease. Mark Brown's video Requiem for a Bogus Journey image-echoes Bill and Ted into a demonic wormhole, Damon Zucconi's Shining flickers a human figure in and out of its low-res existence, Kari Altmann's Soft 404 dissolves the error-message code into a blurring field, and Nathan Hauenstein's eldritch Pillars floats creepy icon totem poles through an expanse of galactic space. The show includes other work by James Whipple, Martijn Hendriks, Ryan Trecartin, Yannick Antoine, Harm van den Dorpel and others. The project's 1.0 iteration consisted of group blogs (one dreams, one 'mares), with respective channels on flickr and vimeo, initiated by Altmann and Brown with many other participants. The dream/nightmare continues next week, when a Netdreams 3.0 will coalesce in the waking world at Current Gallery in Baltimore on August 22. - Ed Halter

Image: John Holland, uralone, 2008