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Outside the Algorithm The Exchange, 24 July - 9 October 2021

Following a year in which we have all become more reliant on digital technologies than we could ever previously have imagined, Outside The Algorithm investigates digital culture, questioning our position as online observers and dares to ask what has this accelerated reliance on technology done for our mental health?

The exhibition, at The Exchange in Penzance, offers a stimulating space for interaction and reflection, with a range of media and artworks including interactive projections, a controversial electric-acoustic radio album, experimental film from international female artists, creative coding and meditative GIFs.

Artists and works featured include Damjanski, a contemporary Yugoslavian artist living in a browser, and his experimental software called bye bye camera, an app that seeks to remove any human presence from cityscapes with a taste of the uncanny valley.

Sam Meech, a UK-based media artist, creates playful interactive and constantly changing projections. Video Culture, which uses audio, visual feedback, and projection mapping, won the ALIFE Inspired Art Award 2020.

Award-winning interdisciplinary artist Rhiannon Armstrong presents, The Slow GIF Movement. Rhiannon brings hers and other people’s lived experience of neurodivergence to an understanding of how GIF culture is currently increasing the hostility of online space, and seeks to rectify that with the creation of calming, gently looping GIFs of her own and others’ creation.

Chez Conversations, an all-female New York collective, present The Age of Misinformation; a short film that questions the reality of our personal connections through technology.

Cyber feminist Laurence Rassel and trans-activist Terre Thaemlitz present an excerpt from their electro-acoustic radio drama album (with spoken word), which examines gender politics and features Peggy Phelan, the American feminist scholar. The cutting-edge work was deemed so controversial that German Public Radio banned it from broadcast.

Martin Vargic, Slovakian author and artist is best known for his Map of the Internet 2.0 (2014) and Map of the Internet 2021. The map is divided between software companies, gaming companies and some of the more real-life oriented websites.

Peter Freeman, an international lighting artist based in West Cornwall creates light sculptures and light installations using neon and LEDs, including the epic illuminated glass façade of The Exchange. www.newlynartgallery.co.uk

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The Best of Both Worlds The Byre Gallery, 24th July - 11th September 2021

Summer continues at the Byre Gallery in Millbrook with The Best of Both Worlds - an exhibition rich in both contemporary art - and contemporary craft from Cornwall and beyond. Three Cornish based artists: Alex Yarlett, Nicola Mosley and Tara Leaver are showing collections of their beautiful sea inspired paintings; and Cornwall jewellers, Lucy Spink, Claire Stockings-Baker and Carin Lindberg also feature in the exhibition with their elegant and timeless work.

From further afield, visitors to the exhibition can enjoy work that can’t be seen in any other galleries in the south west: based in the Highlands of Scotland, Michele Bianco’s hand-carved ceramic vessels and structural works are elegant additions to any home and have deservedly won a growing number of fans; London based ceramicist Loraine Rutt trained and worked as a cartographer before and going to art college to study ceramics. It was there that she began to consider that her two passions might come together - the result is a range of tiny porcelain globes at a scale of 1:170 000 000, that can also be mounted and rotated in little oak cases - heirlooms of the future; and with kiln formed and pâte de verre glass from Verity Pulford from North Wales and blown glass from Venice based Benjamin Lintell, The Best of Both Worlds has something to suit all tastes - from near and far. www.thebyregallery.co.uk

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