Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age is an attempt to show how art responds to the information society. The last decade has witnessed an incredible growth in the production and distribution of images and cultural contents. The availability of inexpensive production tools has seen an exponential rise in amateur creativity, while the Internet provides a new distribution platform for this kind of production, which previously remained private. The show investigates the impact of this process on art practices and on the role of the artist, who more and more evolves into a filter, a collector, an archivist, a post-producer of already existent cultural material.

Furthermore, Collect the WWWorld sets out to demonstrate how the Internet generation is implementing and developing a practice started in the Sixties by Conceptual Art, and further developed in subsequent decades in the forms of Appropriation Art and postproduction: the practice of exploring, collecting, archiving, manipulating and reusing huge amounts of cultural material produced by popular culture and advertising.

Collect the WWWorld is a show first produced by the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age and already presented, in different versions, at Spazio Contemporanea, Brescia (Italy) in September 2011 and at the House of Electronic Arts Basel (Switzerland) in March 2012. The presentation at 319 Scholes will feature a number of new artists and works in a brand-new arrangement. The show relies on an ongoing research project that can be followed online at http://collectheworld. linkartcenter.eu .

The show will also include a reading area with the catalogue of the show, other books by Link Editions, artist books, texts, and catalogues that provided inspiration for the show. The exhibition will serve as the launch for Ryan Trecartin’s Ryan’s Web 1.0, a new e-book that features his W Magazine set as well as documentation of the research that went into the piece, which will be free for download in PDF format.

Participating artists include: Alterazioni Video, Kari Altmann, Gazira Babeli, Kevin Bewersdorf, Aleksandra Domanovic, Constant Dullaart, Elisa Giardina Papa, Travis Hallenbeck, Jason Huff, JODI, Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied, Eva and Franco Mattes, Oliver Laric, Jon Rafman, Ryder Ripps, Evan Roth, Ryan Trecartin, Brad Troemel, Penelope Umbrico, and Clement Valla.

Domenico Quaranta (1978, Brescia, Italy) is an art critic and curator. He is a regular contributor to Flash Art and Artpulse. He is the editor (with M. Bittanti) of the book GameScenes: Art in the Age of Videogames (2006) and the author of Media, New Media, Postmedia (2010) and In Your Computer (2011). He has curated various exhibitions, including Holy Fire: Art of the Digital Age (Bruxelles 2008, with Y. Bernard), Playlist (Gijon 2009 and Bruxelles 2010) and Collect the WWWorld (Brescia 2011 and Basel 2012). He is a co-founder of the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age.