Eva & Franco Mattes (both born in Italy in 1976) are a duo of artists based in New York City. Since meeting in Berlin in 1994, they have never separated. Operating under the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org, they are counted among the pioneers of the Net Art movement and are known for their subversion of public media.[1] They produce art involving the ethical and political issues arising from the inception of the Internet. They are based in Brooklyn, New York, but also travel frequently throughout Europe and the United States.
My Generation occupies this dual space between the digital and physical. In the work, a broken computer lies on the floor while its upturned screen airs a video showing clips of children and young people responding violently to computer games. The children scream, break things, and deliberately harm themselves in response to their video game actions on screen. The artists found the clips on social media and video sharing sites such as YouTube. The work prompts the viewer (who, as a gallery-goer, is implicitly older than the children shown in the film) to question the effect of rapidly changing technology on a younger generation that has grown up with the digital as an inherent part of their lives.
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"Bonsai Kitten", 2021
The piece takes inspiration from a controversial hoax website that provided instructions on how to raise a kitten in a jar, molding its bones to fit the shape of the container. The cat would theoretically grow slowly into form, much like the pruning and shaping of a bonsai plant.
Soon after the creation of the original Bonsai Kitten website in 2000, animal rights activists raised concern. The protests and calls for censorship eventually caused so much uproar that even the FBI launched an investigation into the website.
Despite the story having been debunked countless times, petitions are still circulating to shut down this website. In a way, the attacks against it only contributed to its notoriety and permanence. Mirrors of the site only multiplied, contributing to an endless, self-fueled chain reaction of misunderstanding and obfuscation. In this sense, does the Bonsai Kitten embody a metaphor for internet culture itself?
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A sculpture based on a LOLcat meme, alternately called “Half Cat”, “Panorama Fail Cat” or “Sinko Peso”.
In the original image a cat with two legs and no ears walks down a street, and since it’s earliest appearance in 2010 it has been used in a variety of memes.
At first it was assumed that the strangely truncated image was the result of an error, maybe a Google Street View glitch or a failed panorama shot, until users of online forums were able to track down the original image of the four-legged cat walking along a street in Ottawa, Canada.
The image was not in fact a glitch, but rather a man-made error, simulating a machine error, implying that an accidental technological failure would be more appealing than a skillful photoshop edit.
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The sculptural recreation of an old internet meme. It’s a taxidermy cat peeking through a hole in the ceiling, always watching us, watching it, attractive and scary at the same time, like the internet.