Network, 2010

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

Visualizing the idea that we simultaneously live in a real and virtual world, and that the virtual is infinitely expansive, 'Network' uses large quantities of electric yellow twine (tied in patterns based on both social network structures and Internet network infrastructure) to suggest a virtual network landscape cutting through an otherwise ordinary space. Since November 2009, site-specific versions of 'Network' have been created in a range of kinds of architectures. This version was created for Spatial City, the first exhibition in the United States of artwork drawn from the French Regional Contemporary Art Funds (Frac), brought together an international, multi-generational array of contemporary artists whose work contends with utopian thinking and the idealism and cynicism it inspires.

The exhibition Spatial City originated with the theoretical architecture of the same name by Yona Friedman (b.1923). In his first manifesto, Mobile Architecture (1958), Friedman defined the structures in this ideal city as being transformable, transportable and occupying as little ground area as possible, pushing structures to hover over the earth rather than occupy its surface directly. Friedman's ideas, disseminated in the aftermath of World War II, have influenced subsequent generations both indirectly and directly. While Friedman's concepts informed the framework of the show, the selection of artwork reflects the cycling and recycling of optimism and cynicism in postwar and contemporary culture. Artists in the exhibition are responding to society's complex problems: the failed utopian social experiments that resulted in the dehumanizing conditions of Brutalist architecture, the rise and fall of totalitarian states, the tensions resulting from post-colonial immigration, and the destruction of the environment in the name of progress.

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