Extensions
opening December 25, 2010

The boundary between physical space, and the one brought about by the Internet is fast eroding. Not only are many of our daily activities—correspondence, shopping, work, entertainment—accommodated online, it seems that they are accomplished with incomparably greater speed and economy. The Internet has brought about a regime change, and like previous querelles, there are staunch defendants for and against the progressing immersion of our lifeworld into the logic of the Web.

The World Wide Web was launched on Christmas Day 1990 when computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee successfully used the HTTP networking protocol to communicate between an Internet client and server. That for most of us, daily living has been irreversibly changed since then is obvious, and bears little elaboration, but still to be understood is the expanded context—spatially, socially—that we now occupy. 

Having considered architecture as a spatial practice of a body of knowledge dealing with social, historical and cultural contexts for the past four years, PROGRAM, founded by architects Carson Chan and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga in 2006, will launch PROGRAM ANNEX on Christmas Day 2010.

PROGRAM ANNEX is an online gallery space modeled after PROGRAM’s exhibition space in Berlin. Though its dimensions are the same, unlike PROGRAM, the ANNEX, existing purely on the Internet, is not hindered by real life limitations like gravity or budget. Its walls can twist, multiply and mirror at a moment’s will. Developed with artist-in-resident Timur Si-Qin, PROGRAM ANNEX will exist as PROGRAM’s cyber-double, opening online exhibitions parallel to the physical ones. It is our hope that this parallel activity will further allow us to test the boundaries of what we understand as architecture in the digital age.


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