How to Talk to Images - Exhibition by Richard Wright :: July 4 -August 3, 2008 :: Opening Reception: July 4; 6-9 pm :: HTTP Gallery, Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Road, London N4 1LD.

No one is sure how many images there are on the Internet. Google has nearly a billion. Some say it is hundreds of times more than that.

For How to Talk to Images, Richard Wright has compiled a database of 50,000 random Internet images as the raw content for two artworks. “The Internet Speaks” and “The Mimeticon” use this database to create a world where we can “read” pictures, browse “libraries” of endless images or learn to draw with alphabets.

New Online Work and Film Retrospective

In this era, finding our way through the world of images is so overwhelming, that the dominant mode is to “search” rather than to “see”. An image is an answer to a question, a search query. The Internet Speaks gives us one of the simplest imaginable ways of searching this set of images, stepping through them, one by one in random order, without context. In contrast, The Mimeticon is a wilfully complex and ‘baroque’ search engine that allows us to search for images by visual similarity rather than by typing in keywords. These ’search images’ are ‘drawn’ using letters from the history of the alphabet.

As part of How to Talk to Images, Richard Wright’s first solo exhibition in London, a selection of Wright’s animated films demonstrates the development of his current interest in the Baroque. The exhibition is also the occasion of publication of a limited-edition poster featuring an essay by the artist illustrated by the entire visual history of the Western alphabet – from its pictorial Egyptian origins 5,000 years ago to its perfected form under the Romans, as well as a new book documenting the artists twenty year long practice.

Richard Wright has been making digital animation and interactive pieces since the eighties. Heliocentrum, an animation about Louis XIV, was described by writer Hari Kunzru as “…an amazingly effective way of showing how a sovereign manipulated power” and The Bank of Time was nominated for a BAFTA in 2001. Richard was most recently a member of artists group Mongrel and is currently working on an urban media project called “decorative surveillance”. Since summer 2007 he has been Artist in Residence at Furtherfield.org.

HTTP Gallery is Furtherfield.org’s dedicated space for exhibiting networked media art. Furtherfield.org is a not-for-profit, artist-led organisation. Based in Harringay, North London, we provide an online and physical platform for creating, exhibiting, commissioning, and discussing networked media arts.