isn't the internet great?

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‘Wow, isn’t the internet the best?’ ‘Isn’t it so great?’ ‘Everything and anything is just a few clicks away!’ isthisit?’s 35th online exhibition titled ‘isn’t the internet great?’ brings together a variety of works both celebrating and lamenting the idea of the internet, considering the increased connectivity of our everyday lives and the niche cliques that have formed within the virtual walls of the web. Each of the pieces are layered on top of one another, building towards Samantha Harvey's video piece 'iSurrender' which consists of various disembodied arms surrendering to the viewer, or the screen, or the point at which the viewer and the screen collide, or the overwhelming vastness of the internet meme machine. You decide. The arms are accompanied by a dubious soundtrack, which is both fun and incredibly disconcerting due to its repetitive nature. Behind the piece is Marissa Wedenig's digital collage 'Old Age in Virtual Reality' which looks at how elderly figures in society are acclimatizing to the advent of the internet, forming gangs in the offline and online worlds that they regularly inhabit thanks to the easy access of the ‘free’ internet. Joseph Jackson's simple digital print 'The Perfect Holiday' explores the globalization of leisure and our increased exposure to aesthetically pleasing holiday-scapes on a daily basis. This is overlaid on top of Hannah Edward's film 'How Did We Get Here?' which utilises Google Earth to explore the way users are navigating the world around them with the help of the web, and how the internet is slowly twisting our perceptions of the world, creating a distorted version that can only be seen through the glistening sheen of the screen.

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Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight