Steering Pixels

Shortcuts are fast leaps across information scaffolds; cartridges for accelerated time. Shortcuts imply lower costs, since they train us to become beings who are not used to staying still, pondering, or meandering. Shortcuts symbolise strategic success, and energy-saving efficiency. But in the year 2020—a time of global uncertainty—we gained a new perspective on “what we shortcut into.” The lesson is that perhaps we need to rethink our priorities, and develop an alternative blueprint that does not prioritize shortcuts. The exhibition “The Long Cut” features works that investigate the remote, latent, and liminal space of technologies, and how this awareness can trigger alternative pathways and maps for our shared technological reality. More importantly, it investigates how artists find their own way of living with the hybridity of the physical and the digital. —Iris Long