World of Networks, Centre Pompidou

Networks, from local to global, are ever-present across societies. They are nuanced and complex, impacting both individual and collective experiences. ‘Réseaux-Mondes’ a 2022 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, orchestrates an exploration of networks through the works of sixty artists, designers, and architects. The diversity of works in the exhibition span from 1940 to the present day, addressing issues of surveillance, social networks, cybernetics, post-anthropogenic ecologies, blockchains, actor-network theory, and network of living things.

Credit: Centre Pompidou, Bertrands Prévost

The exhibition addresses a vast, complex issue: understanding why networks play such a decisive role today, how they affect our existence, and what effects they have on expression in our times. As always, in matters of creativity, it is wise to react and be informed but also to leave room for the sensors of our unconscious and emotions, and it is these that the works in the exhibition address.

– RÉSEAUX-MONDES

Credit: Studio Drift, Gert-Jan van Rooij, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

This exhibition begins with the architectural utopias of the post-war period. The notion of a “global network” is then found in artistic practices around cybernetics at the same time as the information society is emerging. In the 1980s, the computer network became the artistic medium with telematic art and then Net.art, ten years later: artistic practices developed into a network in a political and ubiquitous dimension.