Nine artists rewire the internet at Cluj's Aluvial

LAN: The shapes of a net topology opens Thursday, Nov. 5 at 6 p.m. at Aluvial in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and hangs through Nov. 20, per the announcement from the project space Aici Acolo. The title is a double image, and the show knows it: a network diagram and a LAN party are the same picture, machines in one room, wired to each other instead of to a distant cloud.

The exhibition belongs to >_LAN: Local Nodes for Another Net, a project on the politics hiding in network configurations, “from relationships forged in Internet cafes, to satellite swarms recalculating truth.” Its works, the organizers write, propose “reconfigurations in the shapes of the net” and “open other flows on an internet that has to be navigated, bent, to find pockets of resistance.”

The artists are Lucian Barbu, Geo Barcan, Cezar Mocan, Ruxandra Margineanu and Radu-Mihai Tanasa, Sabina Scortanu, Calin Segal, and Alice Strete and Cristina Cochior, with curation by Flaviu Rogojan and Edith Lázár and graphic design by Irina Caia.

Mocan is the name Killscreen readers will know. Mocan's End of Signal, covered here in September, stages 72 satellites as a single artificial mind that reports a lake missing and then argues with itself about why. A show about infrastructure's politics is a natural room for work in which the infrastructure is the unreliable narrator; which piece makes the trip to Cluj, the announcement doesn't say. And the games angle lives in the title. Before the internet was a feed, a local area network was a place: you carried your machine into the room, and play was what the wiring was for.