Since the first WWW addresses started appearing in advertisements on billboards and in magazines in Austria about five years ago, the computer and the Internet have become practically synonymous and are now both a component of everyday culture that is taken for granted. Yet the perceptions of the social collective have undergone fundamental changes at the same time—changes that Axel Stockburger reports on in his exhibition at the Secession. Without succumbing to a refined conservatism that becomes anxious for western Christian culture with every new medium, he is interested in the other side of the hype of a virtuality, whose parallel worlds are increasingly successful in competing and merging with concrete reality.

Stockburger’s exhibition consists of four parts, which intersect with one another and examine individual aspects of virtual worlds with respectively different materialities. A network of cables is drawn through the rooms of the gallery; non-functional joysticks are mounted at the nodes: it is a network that questions the possibilities of permanent interaction and thus also the individual’s possibilities for intervention and control. Code sequences of the encryption software PGP, which provides a way of communicating with someone else directly and with hardly any possibility of control, appear in the classical artistic medium of the panel as C-prints on vinyl. Yet Stockburger blocks this communication with the video installation Most Wanted: on two monitors facing away from one another, pictures are displayed from the most frequently visited websites around the world—CNN, MSN, AOL, etc.—in a sequence that is so rapid that it becomes impossible for viewers to take in the contents. This is information overload, an overload of communication and interactivity that turns the qualities ascribed to the WWW into empty phrases.

Another video work casts a glance back at the individual navigating through computer-generated spaces. It is part of a series of video works that deal with the remnants of bodily reactions and mimetic reflexes, which may be observed among players in space-generating 3D computer games. Although the vision of a world dominated by machines that is occasionally exploited in films is likely to remain utopian, the dependencies that exist today run in both directions: the interaction between people and computers proves to be a relationship of mutual programming. In this context, Stockburger’s works are to be taken as empirical experimental arrangements—the exhibition visitors carry out the experiment themselves.