Launch IN THE FLOW

In November 1996 Franklin Furnace advanced its commitment to the history of the future with our final gallery exhibition, "In The Flow: Alternate Authoring Strategies." In that show we traced some of the artistic threads which already treated art work as flowing information rather than as property. The effects of the fruition of digital media on our perception of content and ultimately upon the nature of individuality and personhood were seen to be predicated by trends already existing within the culture of art. Thus, practice by artists who had used strategies since the seventies and eighties that contradict the notion of a single personal vision such as Sol Lewitt, Louise Lawler, Group Material, Guerrilla Girls, Frank Gillette, Sylvia Benitez, and the international Mail Art movement were shown together with artists whose new strategies were more specifically responsive to developments in the early and mid-nineties including the X-Art foundation, The Thing, Beattie and Davidson, Laura Parnes, Ben Kinmont, Gabriel Martinez, Robbin Silverberg, and the unknown artist. Conceptual and collaborative art dealing with issues of dematerialization of the object, appropriation, and group participation were seen by artist and curator Daniel Georges, the organizer of the exhibition, to be linked to more recent issues of interaction, non-linear narrative, de-centralization of the self, and equalizing of genres in a single digital medium.

In keeping with the exhibition focus, the catalogue for "In The Flow" was created as an on-line feature of the newly launched Franklin Furnace web site designed by Seth which launched on February 1st 1997: www.franklinfurnace.org/flow.

This online catalogue was designed by Daniel Georges.