www.hipic.org

ShanghART Gallery is pleased to present hipic – an innovative online project devoted to a hybrid and elusive form of expression, and a platform for potential endless visual flow.


hipic operates as a globally synchronized image archive that receives, collects, and diffuses pictures via the internet to a variety of visual poles, including public screens and exhibitions, at a pace of one picture per minute. The project was initiated in Shanghai in late 2007 by a group of artists, including Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen and Huang Kui, to create scenarios in which boundaries are deliberately suspended and confused.

Mixing the real with the fictional, the near with the far, and the past with the present, hipic plays simultaneously in galleries and public spaces displaying constant and fluctuating elements. hipic captures imaginations worldwide, in which certain features are highlighted and strengthened, while other details lose their reality and become abstracted.

With its infinite number of possibilities, hipic produces a screen of the mediated reality we live in, and exploits contemporary communication, information and virtual technologies. At the same time, it remains part of the connected and globalized world that it maps, but one that offers material to test the boundaries on liberties offered by art institutions and society.

hipic creates a temporary autonomous zone where relationships and interconnections are reset, before slipping into the system of meanings. The itinerant locations of the screens are reflective of the fluid channels through which information spreads, a dynamic contest of codification and neutralization, where what appears as the everyday conditions of technological mediation and consumption is at stake. Technology is a critical player in this process but its role is essentially that of catalyst and intermediary: hipic enables image exchange and experiences between unlikely groups or individuals.

In this we find the essence of hipic’s nomadic response to the borders between the spaces we occupy and the ideas that occupy us. In a time characterized by information broadcast and exchange, hipic raises the question of what is and isn’t part of the network. With globalization and the world wide web, which is a misnomer in itself, hipic seeks out the reality of this assumed mapping and reach. For the audience the effect never fails to be entertaining and revealing.

Further information, please visit www.hipic.org