Kendal Beynon is an artist and researcher. Sam Mercer is an artist, curator and producer. Together they are putting on Connection Established, an exhibition in London that feels like a physical extension of this newsletter.
What is Connection Established?
Connection Established is a love letter and a rabbit hole into alternative spaces online, be that forums and wikis or personal homepages and poetic sites. We’re trying to highlight how DIY and alternative publishing parallels a world of the digital handmade, with a real focus on autonomous infrastructures (Varia & In-Grid), web communities (MelonLand & Neocities) and the vernacular of these spaces, whether that is the visual cues that rule the communities, or the shared lore developed over time. This exhibition shows how experimentation and play can enter our contemporary digital landscape.
Why did you decide to put it on?
There is a growing dissatisfaction with the state of our web. We’re all being watched, algorithms rule our feeds, and frankly, a lot of this content sucks. Connection Established is trying to imagine what the internet could be by showing that there are other ways to approach being online. We return to the original ethos of the internet community, and how there is a shifting percentage of internet users who want to build something non-extractive, that seemed to be prevalent in earlier, unfiltered iterations of our online lives. It could be easy to quickly rule this show as a nostalgia trip, or the idea of going back to a heavily romanticised era of the internet, but in reality it engages with the ideas of autonomy and agency in a landscape that is so fiercely governed by big tech companies and the monopolising infrastructures that exist within them.
Who or what inspired you?
There are a lot of really exciting projects within this alt web space, your own Internet Phone Book being one of them. I grew up with zero restriction around my internet use (it was the early 2000s) and will forever be driven to the so-called ‘weird’ spots online. You can not expect someone who grew up deep diving into ghost sightings and MySpace glitter badges to just denounce all of that. Mix that with a love of zines and tinkering, and you basically have this show.
Connection Established is running until June 7 at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. If you go, please send photos to me.
