A blinking vertical line—an empty cursor inside a search field is the elemental form of this exhibition. A “regular expression” in computer science defines a set of symbols, which describe a specific search pattern. Here, the term also captures the irony of outcomes when artists work with digital systems governed by the grammars of the searchable and the scrapeable—that is, when they select amongst the Internet’s vast pseudo-inventories that do not quite contain things, but rather their possibilities that are suspended in arrays of presets and on-demand options.
Not readymades, but ready-to-be-mades. These objects and images that have been called, for the moment, “art” seem too strange and slick to have simply been picked from the mundane cache of the “real world;” they smack of a virtual well of potential forms that is somehow both more generic and at the same time more customized. What parts of these things even existed before they were searched for? And so the question of Duchamp’s drag-and-drop gesture is raised to another level of absurdity; not only when did these things turn into works of art, but when did they turn into things at all.