exonemo, 0 to 1 / 1 to 0 at Sunset | Sunrise/Sunset
Feb 6, 2019
In their project 0 to 1 / 1 to 0, the artist team exonemo uses the passage between night and day to explore the digital and natural environments we inhabit. Every day at sunrise and sunset, webpages viewed on whitney.org slowly recede into the browser window to reveal a laptop screen, and beyond that, the rising or setting sun over Manhattan. The webpage is still functional in its minimized state, but the doubling of the screen draws attention to the hardware through which users experience the website. In the natural world, the two- to three-minute change between night and day marks a powerful yet gradual transition that has no equivalent in the digital space, where the switch between the binary code of 0s and 1s is discontinuous. exonemo's project turns these daily moments into a transition between both the digital and natural environments, contrasting the interconnectedness of the digital and natural world with their fundamental differences.
Sunrise/Sunset is a series of Internet art projects that mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day. All are commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org, each project unfolding over a timeframe of ten to thirty seconds. Using whitney.org as their habitat, Sunrise/Sunset projects disrupt, replace, or engage with the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces.
The series is organized by Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum.