From the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests to the meme magick within the run as much as the 2016 Trump election and the emergence of the Dirtbag Left in the course of the Bernie Sanders campaign, there’s a recent breed of American citizen emerging. Their political impulses can now not be neatly mapped onto the X-Y axis of the political compass, nor are you able to tell their political allegiances by how they dress and the places they hang around. The Overton window has cracked open and given method to an increasingly niche-ified political landscape, which will be observed in equal parts online – through memes – and IRL via the production of idiosyncratic flags, t-shirts, bumper stickers. Enter: The Manic American Humanist Show. 

Going down in Latest York’s Public Works Administration, the exhibition picks up during a time when there’s no clear avenues for political potential on the horizon, and no big world event to reignite the progressive agenda. “Our research got here right after the Dirtbag Left movement of the Bernie Sanders campaigns. It was an try and pivot people politically who’re impressionable, possibly falling down right wing conspiracy rabbit holes, after which attempting to – each in humour and education – walk that back somewhat bit,” explains curator Abbey Pusz. Constructing on the culture-jamming roots of post-internet art, the works aim to shine a light-weight on contemporary alienation as seen in the perimeter political corners of the web, from video games to 7chan and the memescape.

The show features works by 4 artists – Emma Murray, Filip Kostic, Holly Oliver and Tomi Faison – who’re core members of the web collective Do Not Research (Pusz herself is the group’s co-director). “These artists break ways with the nihilism underpinning millennial politics, which shares an impact on the art-pessimistic attitude of the contemporary positive art world,” she explains. “Do Not Research has all the time taken an ‘art first’ approach, and acts as an institutional critique by identifying the trends wherein art and curation seems to have been sold out from under itself in favour of a display of its own self-suspicion.”

Among the many works exhibited is Serbian-American artist Filip Kostic’s “Fortnite: 007 Merciful Angel”, a remake of Fortnite set in a 1999 faulty reconstruction from memory of Belgrade, Serbia in the course of the NATO bombing. The playable work is each a retelling of events from the time period surrounding the war and an exploration of the sport space of Fortnite. “The work focuses on the infrastructural basis of Fortnite wherein all of context can collapse throughout the game, using it as a springboard to herald its own contexts into the fold of the sport’s logic, further complicating the collapsing as a form of mirror of the collapsed nature of a recalling of a traumatic event,” says Kostic.

In “Lack Loop”, Tomi Faison positions notes app reflections on gender and identity against clips of 7chan anime girlies and a video of the artist inside a Microsoft XP background drenched in blood. “It displays specific micro-unconscious psychoanalytic observations of desire and drive. The work takes on broad political ideas and trends and traces this connection,” she reveals. Elsewhere, Emma Murray creates a physical obelisk etched with bumper stickers akin to Calvin Peeing and ‘Don’t Blame Me, I Didn’t Vote’ (“bumper stickers are so great as each early advertisements and early memes – that seems so American”), while Holly Oliver’s “Field Notes” is an archival collection of years of phone and laptop notes, in addition to other online ephemera. Created entirely on Google Docs, the piece resembles a digital scrapbook, with personal reflections juxtaposed with free association writings and brainstorms rendered in a digital sprawl of Unicode characters. “The work attempts to capture the experiential ‘materiality’ that forms the substrate for these extended-mind processes,” she explains.

Although told through a deeply personal lens, The Manic American Humanist Show uses the language of web culture – signifiers that we’re all accustomed to to a point as digital natives – to explore the political fringes as an area for experimentation and play. “Where I’m most inspired by these artists, as my peers, is the depth of their sympathy and emphasis on human agency,” Pudz concludes. “The potential to mystify and spectacularise the postmodern moment is hemmed and reigned in by an easy truth: that the web is all the identical to where I grew up.”

The Manic American Humanist Show is on show at Public Works Administration in Latest York between March 10-26