GREENBOX LEAKS

In previous years, HomeShop has been investigating the ins and outs of publicness and locality through the form of newspapers. The intention has been to form a multi-vocal space of statement through a medium of urgency. The newspapers' deadline forces a certain immediacy of content, in both time and place.

In January 2013, when co−curating group show Greenbox: Remapping; the Space of Media Reality, I worked with HomeShop on Greenbox Leaks Project. Arriving in Hangzhou just before the opening, HomeShop started their preview and interviews, researching for a literary review and reaction. At the opening, we turned the exhibition space into a site of underground publishing house − printing and distributing Greenbox Leaks to the audience. With the silkscreen covered in fresh red ink, the audience and artists became their own first readers, creating a future, critical-albeit solipsistic-review during the ongoing event.

Greenbox Leaks adopted the feuilleton model. One recalls that in 1800, the editors of Journal des Débats became the first to include a feuilleton, a kind of supplement with non-political content including art criticism, gossip, recent trends, and hot topics. Afterward, the feuilleton became a hybrid form of news writing typified by literary responses to recent events, full of wit.

Featuring artists working in media art, the exhibition took the Greenbox metaphor as its concern: the methods used in the creation of special effects, which allows multiple layers of imagery to be combined seamlessly. Greenbox Leaks exposed us to a kind of fissure and pointed to potential capacities of a Greenbox methodology. That is: the pressing force of urgent composition, which confuses the order of perceptions, allowing the fake to become real while the public is misled with rumor.