I’ve Been Lookin’ For You, Lonestar… was shown as part of MEANWHILE gallery’s (NZ) annual, online programming in 2018. The work exists as a collaborative exhibition by Jack Caddy and Grace Connors functioning as a virtual, interactive website that explores the responsibility of copyright when it is given to the abyss of internet anonymity, and torrenting as a way to create a digital ‘non place’. The exhibition attempts to draw out these metaphorical connections with an installation of 3D rendered ‘readymade’ objects to make sense of online piracy phenomena and the plight of a number of democratic networks that are currently at odds with corporate capitalism.
The title, while romantic in nature, poetically gestures to the phenomena of the mass deletion of the heavily pirated, 2013 film Dallas Buyers Club (DBC). Where in April 2015 Dallas Buyers Club LLC, representing Voltage Pictures, succeeded in persuading an Australian court to force a group of ISPs to hand over the identities of 4,726 iiNet Australia customers. Although the court case was eventually dropped against leechers of the movie on peer to peer file sharing networks, it raises questions around the anonymity of online users, and the rights to metadata.
I’ve Been Lookin’ for you Lonestar… looks to the thousands of copies leeched and seeded across the globe through peer to peer file sharing. Then to the downloaders sifting through broken links to low budget Western themed porn in the hopes of striking gold; and the prosecutors wading through these murky waters in hopes of squashing these blood sucking leeches as impetus for this virtual exhibition.
I’ve Been Looking’ for You Lonestar… is presented as part of STRAY VOLTAGE, KINGS Artist Run’s iterative video program, collaboratively facilitated by Rebecca McCauley and Aaron Claringbold. Looking to the potential that exists between seemingly incompatible ideas, STRAY VOLTAGE premises an experimental program of critically engaged moving image works, fundamentally grounded by the earth.