Mousse Magazine

Momentum 8 explores tunnel vision as a cultural and artistic condition. Today’s networked culture not only generates hyper-connectivity, but it also produces a range of disconnects that allow people and communities to thrive in their own bubbles. Momentum 8 focuses on artists and cultural producers who inhabit worlds of their own logic and take their ideas to the ultimate consequence.

Momentum takes place in Moss, a small city just outside of Oslo where Edvard Munch withdrew for four years. The relative solitude that he enjoyed there, and which helped to cultivate his eclectic and highly personal practice, is not exceptional. Instead, it is exemplary. Some might tend to condemn the notion of tunnel vision as alarmingly asocial, but artists have long celebrated the concept as disarmingly eccentric. Not only addressing phenomena symptomatic of contemporary society and culture, Momentum 8 also draws on the longstanding idea of “a room of one’s own” as an important premise for artistic practice.

Current techno-scientific developments encourage individualism while simultaneously fostering segregated communities into which individuals can delve and disappear. The personalization of the Internet through the abundant use of cookies and algorithms generates so-called filter bubbles and you loops. User data is deployed in a manner that determines what we find and consequently also what we seek. If the Internet has been considered a window to the world, it is now also becoming our own mirror image on the screen.

Immersion in self-referential loops is echoed in a renewed interest in psychotropic substances within society at large. Whereas the psychedelic movement of the 1960s was concerned with the expansion of consciousness, Momentum 8 focuses on the experience of a narrowing of mind. As we are submerged in a constant flow of data, new drugs and technologies are used to create a tunnel vision that hones the spectrum of information available to us and our access to it. Addressing conspiracy theories, paranoia and altered states of mind, the biennial explores what might be called compressed consciousness, which may appear incestuous, navel-gazing and idiosyncratic.

At Momentum 8 the theme of tunnel vision will unfold as a multisensory experience triggering altered states of mind, physical awareness and an atmosphere that ties the various venues and events together across time and space. The artists of Momentum 8 will present fragrances, sound pieces, 3D works, apps, music, installations and performances.

Momentum 8 Reader by Mousse Publishing

.

at Momentum Kunsthall and Galleri F15, Moss

until 27 September 2015

.