LABcyberspaces: Physicality and virtuality
By Rosina Gomez-Baeza
The LABcyberspaces contest and the resulting exhibition aim to promote the participation of artists from different origins, fulfilling one of the main objectives of the LABoral Center of Art and Industrial Creation: to harness emergent trends and to facilitate the production of art works, opening itself up to diversity.
In the digital age nobody can stand back from or deny the brilliant expectations that open themselves before this art form. Cynthia Freeland considers cyber-art the most authentic of the new digital media but the truth is that the art practice developed using these media often passes by unnoticed and proves diffi cult to incorporate in the art circuit.
With this exhibition, LABoral pretends to join physicality and virtuality. The ten works chosen take shape, by the hand of two great experts, curators of the show: Gerfried Stocker and Manuela Pfaffenberger (Ars Electronica). We reclaim, for diverse audiences, the imagination with which serious cyber-nauts, not the casual visitors of an art center identify, granting the works the "significance" of any work displayed in a museum.
It has been an honor to form part of a jury formed by Alex Adriaansens, Christiane Paul and Gerfried Stocker. These three great professionals of the arts and of the most daring initiatives, have shown, since the beginning, a great enthusiasm for the LABoral project, and have offered us their support in a thrilling and generous way.
I am extraordinarily pleased by the work undertaken by both curators and their broad collaboration with the artists, the architects and the production team for having made possible this interesting and original exhibition project.