DIS

Subject to Shadowban

10 January 2023 — 30 June 2023

M+ Hong Kong

On show at M+ Mediatheque, Subject to Shadowban, commissioned by dis.art, reflects critically on the history and culture of the Internet. Specifically, how does the internet relate to labour and identity formation, and how we can challenge our everyday habituation to its omnipresence?

Is Meta a company, or the general state of being online? What subliminal messaging is influencing me as I fall asleep to ASMR videos? How do algorithmically curated choices interact with our free will? Do I gain comfort watching mukbang videos and cleaning tutorials, or anxiety? How are teen hype houses on social media influencing elections? Could video games be used as social experiments for implementing new economic systems? Can we hack the digital classroom? What, if any, online experiences remain that don’t relate back to a consumptive practice?

Tech now defines us — not the other way around. It is not just a neutral instrument, a means to an end, but has become our way of understanding the world, evolving at a pace that is beyond our control. While the web was intended to enlighten us and make truth accessible to all, we find ourselves foraging and wandering in the shadows for it. Feeling our way in the dark, this is where we might be able to see more clearly.

Works on show include:

10,000 Words: Seasonal Associate byAda O’Higgins

After Scarcity by Bahar Noorizadeh

Classrooms by Shawn Maximo

Couture Critiques by Mandy Harris Williams

Degrees of Disgust by Will Benedict and Steffen Jørgensen

DOMESTIC/STANDARD by Nicholas Korody

Eulogy for a Black Mass by Aria Dean

General Intellects with McKenzie Wark: Sianne Ngai by DIS

Once Upon a Who? by Simon Fujiwara

September 5th, 2006 by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman

The Bots by Eva and Franco Mattes

When Guys Turn 20 by Joshua Citarella and Jacob Hurwitz-Goodma

DIS

The collective DIS is exemplary in defining what Hannah Black in Artforum describes as the “relentless anxiety about the conditions and possibilities of art and life, express(ing) the despairing atomization, and the compromised longing for solidarity, of a post-bourgeois creative class hovering on the brink of its own obsolescence”.

Formed in 2010, after the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and global recession, DIS as an entity has over the decade typified its aesthetic, cultural, political and economic impact. Composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro, DIS’ interventions blur the distinctions between art, curation, theory, advertising, fashion, retail and technology, manifesting across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects, often all at once. Their work exists often simultaneously online and in situ, as well as more traditional mediums like photography, sculpture, video and installation. Their current multi year project dis.art is a subscriber-based online video channel popularising in “edutainment”, helping us understand the complicated social machinery of our techno-capitalist world. The channel presents new commissions with other artists as well as DIS’ own content.

In 2021, DIS co-curated the Biennial for Image Movement Geneva, featuring their latest work Everything but the World. In a series of interrelated vignettes, Everything But The World presents a non-linear, natural history show about homo sapiens, linking the agricultural revolution to Amazon fulfillment centers. It addresses the gulf between the complexity of the human’s global existence and the smallness of their private everyday lives, and confronts our obsession with “the end of the world” knowing the arrogance of that word: ‘the’.

Recent solo exhibitions include, How To Become A Fossil at Secession, Vienna, Everything But The World at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Big Beat Disaster at Project Native Informant, London.

View Profile