Migrating Origins
The engagement with digital media is now normalised in developed countries, what’s more we are seeing a generation grow up that has never known the world without the internet. How this network is sometimes perceived, as an entity with no formal boundaries, is problematic; therefore a critical distance must be kept. In relation to human cognition the internet is ubiquitous, encroaching and politicised. Site, skill and authorship become further obscured in its context and materiality is supplanted by a purported immateriality: it poses a complex source to consider as an artist.
Moving Image operates as a fluid and commodifiable component across these network technologies. As a medium and mode of reception it is becoming increasingly dispersed into the ambience of daily life as an ‘inalienable right’. Subsequently it is consumed by – or rather embedded into – the fabric of our everyday lives and is thus becoming a ‘technological invisibility’; a naturalised, unquestionable presence. This poses an immediate problem regarding the power structures inherent within moving image’s reception and production. If we no longer retain the capacity to critically exclaim its existence, we are readily subsumed. Migrating Origins invites artists to react to these pertinent issues.