Douglas Coupland: Bit Rot - Press Release June 2015

Press release Rotterdam, 4 June 2015

Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland The End of the Middle Class and What Comes Next

Douglas Coupland, CMYK Colour registration Heads, 2015, Acrylic on B&W photo laminated onto canvas, 51 x 71 cm, courtesy the artist

Bit Rot Douglas Coupland 11 September 2015 – 3 January 2016 Opening and Artist Talk: 10 September 2015, 5 pm Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art is proud to present Bit Rot by artist and novelist Douglas Coupland. Bit Rot is Coupland’s very first largescale solo exhibition in Europe and will be on view from 11 September 2015 until 3 January 2016. The exhibition presents Coupland’s ‘mindscape’, combining his own work with loans from his personal collection, as well as material stemming from his recent residency at the Google Cultural Institute. An eponymous paperback collection of new and existing short stories and essays written and compiled by the artist will accompany the exhibition.

Throughout the exhibition Coupland shares his thoughts on globalization, terror, the Internet, pop-culture, social media and the resulting accelerated image economy. Taking its title from the phenomenon in which digital data spontaneously and quickly decomposes, Bit Rot creates an associative and visually playful constellation in which memory, loss, fame, violence, destruction, and creation are subjects for contemplation.

For many years Douglas Coupland has been intuitively collecting art works, images and objects, creating a collection perhaps only fully legible to himself. Each of the exhibited strands of work began as impulsive purchases but ultimately led to forms of clarity in regards to deeply rooted needs and wants. Now, for the first time, Coupland exhibits these collected works together with his own.

Following his residency at the Google Cultural Institute, Paris in early 2015, Coupland also presents The Living Internet, a kinetic room-sized sculptural tableau visualizing what the Internet and online searching actually looks like.

Important to the framework of the exhibition is a piece of writing included in the Bit Rot publication, titled An app called: Yoo. This fictional app, conceived by Coupland, creates new and unique visual material based on all of the (meta-)data individuals generate throughout their lives. If the Yoo app, in essence a mind-mapping tool, were to produce an exhibition, Bit Rot is what that might look like.

Yoo brings previously unobserved life patterns to the surface.

Yoo allows you to reinterpret any day of your life in an infinite number of ways.

Yoo finds connections in your life that you didn’t know were happening and makes them for you, before your eyes.

Yoo, poetically, allows you to reincarnate while still living.

Yoo takes images, sounds and text from the course of your day (or week or year) and weaves them together so that they morph, jump-cut and dissolve.

Every new technology allows us new opportunities to explore our humanity.

That’s what Yoo is all about.

Excerpts from An app called: Yoo, published in Bit Rot, Douglas Coupland, 2015

With this exhibition, Witte de With continuous its artist-focused program where not only works by visual artists are presented to the audience, but where their view on culture at large, their mind and their interests are also brought to the fore. Central to this approach is a strong interest in interdisciplinary practices. In the case of Douglas Coupland, writing and visual arts go hand in hand and become extensions of one another. Often labeled a “visual writer”, Coupland is a truly “visual thinker”, whose analysis of current times includes not only art (history) but also design, economics, globalization, and technology’s impact on daily life.

Publication Published by Witte de With, Bit Rot is a paperback collection of short stories written for the exhibition, which functions as an accompanying work running parallel to the different clusters of art works in the exhibition. Emphasizing the importance of literature as an artistic medium, Coupland readdresses the issues at stake in the exhibition through the medium of writing. Bit Rot will be launched during the opening of the exhibition on 10 September 2015.

About Douglas Coupland Douglas Coupland (1965) is a Canadian novelist, visual artist and designer.

He has published fourteen novels, a collection of short stories, seven nonfiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. Coupland’s novels and visual work synthesize high and low culture, web technology, religion, and changes in human existence caused by modern technologies. With incisiveness and humor reminiscent of Fischli and Weiss, Coupland’s work questions contemporary issues and suggests new ways of seeing the world.

In 1991 he published his first novel, Generation X, which eventually became an international bestseller. Defining a generation with his debut, Coupland has ever since been capturing the Zeitgeist like no other.

Support Bit Rot is made possible with support of Intracorp Vancouver and AMMODO. The exhibition is presented as part of Futurosity, supported by Rotterdam Festivals.

About Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art is an international public institution with Rotterdam as its home base. Established in 1990, Witte de With explores developments in contemporary art worldwide. Witte de With has been commenting on the social and political predicament since its inception through the presentation of curated exhibitions, symposia, live events, educational programs, and a bold publishing arm.

Contact Witte de With For press requests or for further information, please contact Adelheid Smit via press@wdw.nl or call +31 10 411 01 44.