Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/523863
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 7 JUNE 2015 This Week 41 Exposing the 'new weapons' at our fingertips A new collective exhibition at Blitz, St Lucy Street, Valletta in collabora- tion with Central St Martins Univer- sity (CSM) in the UK will delve into the ubiquitous and multiplied image in today's digital age. Entitled New Weapons, the exhibiton will be on display at Blitz from June 12 to 21. It is an exploration of the prolif- eration of the networked image in an online environment, and the idea that an image can be in many places simultaneously: on your smartphone and your laptop, in Europe and Asia, on Google and Facebook. In short that there is no original, only ver- sions. New Weapons is the first exhibi- tion worldwide to fully embrace the photographic concept of the network by existing in multiple versions in multiple locations. Blitz Director Alexandra Pace is a recent graduate of the CSM MA pro- gramme and has established an on- going professional relationship with the university. Through this collaboration Blitz is supporting CSM students by invit- ing them to use the space as a remote location to explore the simultaneous existence of the contemporary im- age. New Weapons is not simply the dismantling of one exhibition to take it to another location. Rather it is about simultaneity and multiplicity. On May 13, a container at CSM was loaded with artworks created for the exhibition in Malta. Two weeks later, when the CSM end of year degree show was opened to the public, a screen at the entrance to the gallery showed a live map and GPS tracking of the container ship's movements. This screen was part of an artwork entitled Mare Nostrum, by Bonamy Devas, one of the artists featured in the New Weapons show. Devas' installation at Central Saint Martins in London was a dispersed artwork that explores the structure and nature of networks. As the con- tainer travelled by sea to Valetta the live location data from the ship's navigation system controlled a laser, literally drawing with light onto a surface of phosphorescent paint that leaves a transient trace. As the ship nears Malta the data feed from its navigation system is dis- rupted by the location data of all the migrant shipwrecks that have taken place during the two years of the MA course. The Central Saint Martins Pho- tography MA group is operating in terrain that understands the visual image in philosophical terms – mul- ti-dimensional, process-driven and defragmented – in short, beyond a linear rhetoric of content, measure- ment and description. These artists' work experiments with sound, video, data feeds and sculpture, which collectively indicate the complex terrain of the visual im- age which they are investigating. The exhibition will be launched at Blitz, St Lucy Street, Valletta at 20:00 on June 12. For more information and other initiatives at Blitz, log on to http://thisisblitz.com/ The artists and their container of artworks Bonamy Devas Parveneh Rahimi