MEDIA RELEASE >
A special thank you to all the internet users who dreamt-up, made, combined, and distributed the GIFs used throughout this project. Their many hours of labour have not gone unnoticed, nor have their historically distinctive usernames.
Also, a big high-five to the Wayback Machine for this one.
Marquee is an exhibition of moving image works that consider the visual language of the Myspace era (approximately 2004-2008). The works are a quiet tribute to an internet culture that was glitzy and glamorous, romantic, emotional, and vulnerable.
During this period GIFs were used to communicate affect on the popular social networking website Myspace. Computer graphics were shared between web communities, often picking up different edits and image-names along the way.
The moving image works of Marquee are digital collages of GIFs collected from archived MySpace webpages and web community forums. These websites were once buzzing with activity, but now sit haphazardly archived like incomplete digital graveyards. What remains provides a historical reference point for the evolution of the internet. Here in Marquee, surviving GIFs from Myspace sparkle and flash; redistributed to fall down a screen eternally on a loop as an attempt at celebrating the messy MySpace era.
Shannon Marlborough is a new media artist with a passion for exploring archived online communities from the early internet that encouraged play and experimentation. Marlborough’s practice involves researching and appropriating found digital content into compositional moving images to investigate the unique materiality of digital forms. She aims to evoke questions regarding the dominant usage of the internet and the necessity of internet media archival. Marlborough is based in Boorloo/Perth. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from Curtin University in 2018 and has since exhibited at FELTspace, in group shows at Paper Mountain and Smart Casual, and online at the Dirt Gallery (NZ) Online art space.