Artist Talk: Wolfgang Staehle

For Spike’s sevent artist talk at Soho House Berlin, “Slow Networks,” net.art pioneer Wolfgang Staehle will map out the technical and aesthetic ancestries of our contemporary adventures in cyberspace, focusing on a three-decade old proto-social network that presaged the emergent tensions, sentiments, and consequences of digital connectivity. A Q&A with Spike editor Christian Kobald will follow.

Begins 19h on Tuesday 16 May 2023 at
Soho House, “Torstrasse 1” (second floor), Torstraße 1, 10119 Berlin
The bar will be open until 9pm

RSVP to spike@spikeartmagazine.com before Monday 15 May; seating is limited

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Wolfgang Staehle (*1950) is a German-born American artist. In 1991, following a successful career exhibiting in international galleries, he co-founded the New York-based virtual artist community The Thing, a bulletin board system of messaging and file-sharing that hosted an S&M roleplay run by artist Julia Scher and exhibited one of the first artworks sold online, Peter Halley’s digital print Superdream Mutation (1993).
 
In 1996, The Thing began hosting Staehle’s live video streams from sites in the US and Europe, such as the Empire State Building and a Benedictine monastery near his hometown. One of these webcam feeds is one of the only known videos to document the crash of the first plane into the World Trade Center on 11 September. Staehle’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and group shows at The New Museum, New York; Museum Fridericianum, Kassel; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, among others.

Events
Soho House
Artist Talk
Wolfgang Staehle
net art

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