You can already directly stream video using your laptop or mobile phone, and it is only a matter of time before the constant broadcasting of one's life becomes as common as email. And this is no new phenomenon or theory. People have been sending comical fragments of their home movies to T.V. clip show You’ve Been Framed since 1990. Web 2.0 and particularly www.youtube.com have, since around 2005, taken over this process and removed the need for an editor and even a presenter. More recently clips uploaded to www.youtube.com have been removed and re-broadcast on British television on the show Rude Tube presented by Alex Zane much in the style of You’ve Been Framed from two decades earlier but rated by the number of online viewings they have received.

This confusion of presentation techniques within mass media over the past few decades has been facilitated by changing technology both in industry and within a domestic setting. Hughes is really interested in this confusion. We’ve been Re-Distributed is a work which adopts various forms to reflect these tendencies and extends them through other means of communication and presentation. The work uses randomly found, selected and edited video presented via VHS projection, various forms of print based material and mass communication via email. This process of selection, context changing and re-presentation highlights how society consumes media, how this affects the meaning of media and how we understand ourselves through this. We are now all potentially producers. The “We’ve” mentioned in the works title reflects not just the re-distribution of the material in the work but how societies position as viewers and consumers of media have been changed through web 2.0 and the opportunities presented by it.

Today we are seeing new kinds of communication in which content, opinion, and conversation often cannot be clearly separated. Consider also online forums or the comments below website entries: the original posts may generate long discussions that go in new directions, with the first item long forgotten.

1 And 2 Manovich, L; Art After Web 2.0 taken from The Art of Participation: 1950's to Now; pp.74 and pp.75; Thames & Hudson; New York; 2009

ARTicle is a new public gallery and project space, sited within the School of Art, Birmingham City University. ARTicle’s focus is to present invited art professionals who explore and critically engage with current curatorial debates and practices within wider Art production. ARTicle is ever aware of its context within the Art School educational environment and with that in mind will function as a discursive space that engages with and reflects on contemporary and historical Art practices. ARTicle will endeavour to negotiate and bridge the boundary between internal producers and production and interesting practices within the larger art world. Taking this into consideration, ARTicle will work with a variety of contributors on the local, national and international stage.

The space is directed by Mona Casey, artist-curator, in conjunction with the MA Contemporary Curatorial Practice post-graduate course at Birmingham City University.

ARTicle gallery, School of Art, Margaret Street, Birmingham, B3 3BX/ Open: Monday – Friday 10 – 6pm