Antoni Abad
dal 17/2/2014 al 23/6/2014
Segnalato da
17/2/2014
Antoni Abad
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona MACBA, Barcelona
Megafone.net/2004-2014. Since 2004, megafone.net has been inviting groups of people on the fringes of society to express their experiences and opinions through face-to-face meetings and mobile phones. Since 1997 Antoni Abad has focused on digital media.
Between the late eighties and early nineties, Antoni Abad (Lleida, 1956) focused on the development of mobile sculptures that, accompanied by photographic sequences, already inquired into the possibilities of the expanded and moving image. After a period as artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta, Canada), he began working with the videographic medium, without renouncing to the spatial and architectural concerns of his earlier work, as we can see in the piece Últimos deseos (Latest Wishes), 1995, which was presented in 1999 at the Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann. In 1996, following an invitation from Roc Parés for the platform ‘MACBA online’, a project initiated by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and MACBA, Abad made Sisyphus, a video installation that reinterprets the classic myth and that also unfolds into a new version for the web: his first foray into the Internet. In 1997 he made a further video installation, Natural Sciences, which investigated users’ reactions of empathy and repulsion.
Since then Antoni Abad has focused on digital media, making proposals as emblematic as Z (2001–3), a work that anticipates the use of social networks, where users interact with each other by downloading to their computers a virtual fly allowing for collective and simultaneous interaction. The Z project was presented at MACBA in 2002 and received the Ciutat de Barcelona 2003 award in the Multimedia category.
Based on the above-mentioned investigations, megafone.net pioneers the exploration of other possible social and communicative uses for mobile phone technologies, which were in wide use at the end of the last century.
Organization and Production: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
Image: Participants in the You Plural project
Prensa MACBA: Ines Martinez Ribas 934 813 356 / 934 813 354 press@macba.cat
Press Conference and Opening: 18 February 2014
MACBA
Plaça dels Àngels, 1, 08001 Barcelona
Opening times
Weekdays, 11 am to 7.30 pm
Saturdays, 10 am to 9 pm
Sundays and public holidays, 10 am to 3 pm
Closed Tuesdays (except public holidays)
Open Mondays