What happens when media and technology are no longer new, but the stuff of everyday life? What happens when the technologies we grew up with become trash and treasure? 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents its new exhibition, After Effect curated by Olivier Krischer, which ponders the complex time and space in which we live. The exhibition includes eight artists from Japan, Europe, America and Australia whose works integrate technology into their practice and demonstrate a shift in our relationship to so-called new media, no longer simply nostalgic nor futuristic, but as an element of everyday experience.

Artists have often oriented their encounter with media technologies and concepts as pioneering explorations of a bright, uncertain future. For the artists in this exhibition, “new media” are no longer new, they are the stuff of everyday life. Technologies we grew up on are now displayed in museums, or found littering op-shops and eBay; as trash and treasure, or just spare parts.

The practices represented in After Effect speak very much to the present—to presence: what it constitutes to be here, now. To create is no longer conceived of as adding space to the known world; perhaps more than ever before creation means giving new meanings to things, proposing alternative arrangements, revisiting abandoned trajectories, and revealing possibilities. This is about finding additional ways of being with/in the same old world.

The artists in After Effect highlight the effective presence of a human subject in diverse media. Their work revisits the inherent contingency of media, not simply as the object of an abstract critical discourse, but rather as the site of renewable social formations.

After Effect includes works by Aikawa Masaru (Japan), Jason Kofke (US), Kawachi Koshi (Japan), David Lawrey and Jaki Middleton (Australia), Mateusz Herczka (Poland/Sweden), Sumugan Sivanesan (Australia), and Kehara Hiroki (Japan).

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