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Analogue is the new Digital - An exhibition across the digital networks of Manchester

This curated exhibition project highlighted interventions across Manchester in various public venues with newly commissioned and experimental installations that reflect on the invisible sub-structure of data that permeates our world. The city’s networks and rich technological history formed the underlying conceptual grid of the research. The show subverted the linear process of media production and investigated the subject from today’s digital perspective, but was resolutely analogue in its output. In the era of ‘post’ - be it postmodern or even post human - it opened up a ‘post-digital’ discourse by mixing the realities and inventing another terrain whilst harking back to early stages in visual technology and methodology. The show commissioned 18 established artists and collectives from the UK and Europe to re-think data processes and explore the physicality of code; coming from very diverse backgrounds such as sound and video art, drawing, sculpture and textiles; mobile media, tele-robotics, programming and networking, they were asked to apply as well as distort their methods at the same time. Overall the project initiated multi-disciplinary and collaborative research into the given subject matter. It debated whether the digital information space was an essential artistic one by leading it back to the corporeal, therefore creating an important and necessary synthesis at this time of change in Visual Arts. It included two performance events and one workshop with audience participation and was supported by and part of the International Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival, a major event in the North West. Zapp was then commissioned by the International Siggraph Digital Arts Community (DAC), Los Angeles, to curate an online exhibition of the same title, show-casing art works by international members, academics and practitioners of this network. This was physically launched at the Siggraph Conference in Vancouver in August 2011 and exhibited online for two months