DSL Collection

hipic operates as a globally synchronized image archive that receives, collects, and diffuses pictures via the internet to a variety of visual poles, including public screens and exhibitions, at a pace of one picture per minute. The project was initiated in Shanghai in late 2007 by a group of artists, including Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen and Huang Kui, to create scenarios in which boundaries are deliberately suspended and confused
Mixing the real with the fictional, the near with the far, and the past with the present, hipic plays simultaneously in galleries and public spaces displaying constant and fluctuating elements. hipic captures imaginations worldwide, in which certain features are highlighted and strengthened, while other details lose their reality and become abstracted.

With its infinite number of possibilities, hipic produces a screen of the mediated reality we live in, and exploits contemporary communication, information and virtual technologies. At the same time, it remains part of the connected and globalized world that it maps, but one that offers material to test the boundaries on liberties offered by art institutions and society.



hipic creates a temporary autonomous zone where relationships and interconnections are reset, before slipping into the system of meanings. The itinerant locations of the screens are reflective of the fluid channels through which information spreads, a dynamic contest of codification and neutralization, where what appears as the everyday conditions of technological mediation and consumption is at stake. Technology is a critical player in this process but its role is essentially that of catalyst and intermediary: hipic enables image exchange and experiences between unlikely groups or individuals.



In this we find the essence of hipic?s nomadic response to the borders between the spaces we occupy and the ideas that occupy us. In a time characterized by information broadcast and exchange, hipic raises the question of what is and isn?t part of the network. With globalization and the world wide web, which is a misnomer in itself, hipic seeks out the reality of this assumed mapping and reach. For the audience the effect never fails to be entertaining and revealing.

? A part and backdrop of this evening will be the presentation of Hipic.org, an image for all time: an online project as a place of the ephemeral, where a photo sums up in 1 minute the need for vision before disappearing for all time in a cybernetic void: forever. Art without an artist, art without economic value, art that appears and disappears, the quest for attention and observation, knowing that this is the sole possibility in the world and the only simultaneous moment in the world (of the worldwide web). Hipic, a democratic archive location with no hope for the future, is very fitting in the case of Shanghai and China today, with specific reference to Shanghai: this idea of the continuous move towards something else, with no past and possibly no idea of the future either ? this impertinent, optimistic and flattering present that leaves no time other than for a cursory glance at reality. A glance like so many others: totally useless. ?