Jillian Mayer in collaboration with Eric Schoenborn
Web-based project
Now live at www.EraseyPage.com
Premiered in proto-type form at the Bass Museum of Art in April 2012.
EraseyPage exists as a faux web page and video will allow web users to participate in both the liberating and anxiety producing experience of "erasing the Internet." Users are invited to interact with the page and follow a series of basic steps that will end the distraction and saturation of identity that is the world’s most powerful and innovate tool.
Referencing the literal concepts that have been created by the work of Ann Hamilton, Erasey Page offers participants a way to start fresh by erasing the web and therefore online ones presence and identity, thereby allowing for a new sense of personhood to arise. Erasey Page will also demonstrate both the relevance and irrelevance of the Internet. Users who are seeking additional support are invited to 'call-in' to the EraseyPage phone line for more clarity or to voice concerns.
*The websites that are entered into EraseyPage by participants to be erased by participants are being recorded and will be exhibited at a later date.
Information from the Bass Museum of Art:
Erasey Page is a newly commissioned web-based project that Mayer produced in collaboration with computer programmer, designer, and creative technologist Eric Schoenborn, which will be on view in the Bass Museum’s recently renovated project room space. The interactive website begins with a greeting from the artist as a pop-up spokes model who promotes visitors to live an internet-free and happy life by simply deleting the World Wide Web page by page. Participants are then encouraged to type in a web address of their choosing to erase. Afterwards, the spokesperson reappears to thank visitors for making the choice to regain their lives and to enjoy “a less computer interactive and a more real-time reactive lifestyle.”
Contemporary culture is profoundly informed by the ways we access, navigate and use information online, which is both celebrated and questioned by the artist. Lying somewhere between a parody of utopian ideals and an infomercial for a self-help product, Erasey Page humorously comments on one’s personal agency. The project becomes particularly poignant in light of recent activism and online blackouts in protest against the U.S. government’s proposed legislation—SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) & PIPA (Project IP Act)—which aims to regulate user-contributed material on the Internet and block entire websites. However, Mayer’s proposition is more directed towards questioning our increasingly virtual lives (via social media, etc.) to playfully imagine a world without the Internet.
–Curated by Kristin Korolowicz, Knight Curatorial Fellow
