Dead Web: The Death of the Internet

Dead Web: post-Internet according to

artists. The end of the Internet: overnight, no more email, Facebook, Tinder or even ordinary websites. Victim of a capacity crisis, the Internet collapses violently during a peaceful night in 2023, ending 25 years of unlimited information and taking with it an entire part of our history. This death, whose unsettling impact is difficult to grasp, is certainly far-fetched, but it was nevertheless the subject of a scientific symposium organized in 2015 by the British Royal Society. Inspired by this disaster scenario, curator Nathalie Bachand invited artists to imagine the after-Internet, create works from those reflections and present them in an exhibition at Eastern Bloc. The Dead Web — La Fin brought together

works by five

artists, who explained their process during the opening night at the Clark Street gallery on January 19. Memento Vastum by Julien Boily uses a classic format: oil painting. Its subject is an empty human skull facing a computer screen, a symbol of our modern morbid obsession. Inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch painters who lit their subjects with candles, Boily places an extinguished candle on the worktable. The tension between pictorial tradition and the modernity of the LED screen invites us to consider what technological

progress can make us lose. L’Objet de l’Internet

by Projet EVA, Simon Laroche and Étienne Grenier, offers references to experimental film, light therapy and William Burroughs’s disjointed universe. This carousel-like installation gives a psychedelic experience to anyone who places their head among its distorting panes. Through the rapid movement of a revisited dream machine, it echoes the circular narcissistic relationship created by the Internet and the web user’s endless reflection in the void

of the Web. Infinitisime.com Forever

a Prototype by Frédérique Laliberté is a web installation. For the artist, the Web is both a public and personal space, a container in which we publish our lives. During the exhibition, Infinitisime.com displays collages of files, images and sounds drawn from the artist’s personal archives; each visit to the gallery computer produces a different audiovisual composition. Paper-mâché and cardboard hard drives beside the station symbolize the fragility of the Internet. BPM 37093

by Julie Tremble

is an animated video that makes a more symbolic link with the exhibition. Tremble’s interest in natural disasters resonates with the computer catastrophe that the death of the Internet would represent. Her inspiration is an astronomical disaster, the death of the star BPM 37093, which is said to have become a diamond, a metamorphosis our sun will experience in billions

of years. Mémoires éteintes III by

Grégory Chatonsky and Dominique Sirois closes the tour with the exhibition’s most imposing installation. This post-apocalyptic work combines synthetic images and eclectic YouTube videos, from the destruction of an iPhone to drunken mishaps and cats, all evoking the emptiness of Internet culture. Most striking is the server cemetery, represented by wooden blocks on gravel that recall archaeological excavation squares, as if remains from the Internet era were about to be unearthed. Web page for The Dead Web – La Fin.

The Dead Web – La Fin, Eastern

Bloc production and exhibition centre, 7240 Clark, January 19 to February 15, 2017. Gallery hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Photo credits: Geoffroy de Kerorguen.