Thursday, 21 February 2008 | Levent OZLER
Virtually Mine: CITIZEN:Citizen Launches a Global Virtual Archive
For the past month, CITIZEN:Citizen has been building an online archive called Virtually Mine, which attempts to be the largest collection of objects and their meanings for the world to share.
Virtually Mine launched at Peel Gallery in Houston when CITIZEN:Citizen decided to invert established art gallery norms and rather than curate a show themselves, they invited guests to become the curators in the exhibition titled Virtually Mine.
In opposition to current trends of glamorising design as elitist and expensive work, Virtually Mine celebrates the everyday and the personal asking one to rethink their possessions and explore how they value the objects in their life.
For the exhibition in Houston, visitors were invited to bring their own objects or designs into the gallery. Each item was photographed, recorded, tagged with a unique ID and added to the digital archive. Each guest was also asked to write about what the object meant to him or her. This information and the objects digital record was then uploaded to the virtual archive.
From this initial show, CITIZEN:Citizen will produce a series of exhibitions in museums and galleries across the country and develop the Virtually Mine online archive. Ultimately within these days of mass global consumerism, Virtually Mine offers a chance to observe ours and others relationships to the objects in our lives.
The project was conceived by CITIZEN:Citizen as part of their on-going exploration of art and design. Creative Director of CITIZEN:Citizen Philip Wood said that, "There are several concurrent cultural movements that have stimulated us to create Virtually Mine at this time. The first is that as our world becomes more virtual, we realize the objects in our lives attain new meanings and values. This is combined with our current and ongoing reassessment of consumer culture and how we measure the various environmental, economic and political implications that our consumption has on our world".
Visit Virtually Mine and reconsider the meaning of the objects in your life.
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