EVA AND FRANCO MATTES Emily’s Video 2012 HD video, color, sound 15 minutes

ABOUT THE ARTISTS No, I cannot show you this video. It’s bad. I’m not allowed to for various reasons and I can’t tell you what’s on the video. Piece it together from the worst real raw footage you can’t admit you watched, juxtapose it with the disgusting and sprinkle it with dread. The concept of the project was to record volunteers watching this little mixtape of horrors, in a classic “reaction video” YouTube trope. All these reaction videos are now virally spreading on the . The original video doesn’t exist anymore, it was destroyed and can only be experienced through people’s reactions. A rather literal interpretation of Duchamp's idea that «it is the viewer who makes the artwork». As in their previous work No Fun the Mattes work with poor images. The videos are shot in private apartments, using webcams - a camera that is meant to film oneself - so that people easily forget they're being filmed and behave freely. Watching others’ reactions is a bit baffling. It seems that those that watched this in pairs and groups are almost vamping for each other. They seem less affected. They’re laughing. Did they even see what I saw? It’s a notch in my mental belt like my other unpleasant experiences, it was a knowledge of pain, something à la Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou. There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Then, of course, there’s the shame of the playback, of watching yourself watching something, seeing the inescapable artifice of a different sort of self-awareness. When you realize Emily’s Video is looking back at you. Emily's Video was commissioned by The of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, DK.

Born in 1976, now based in New York, Eva and Franco Mattes, (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG) have been pioneers in the net.art movement remixing famous digital art pieces and performing Life Sharing: a real-time digital self portrait, during which they submitted to satellite surveillance for an entire year. In the last decade they have created unpredictable mass-scale performances staged outside the traditional art venues and involving an unaware audience, where truth and falsehood mix to the point of being indistinguishable. They created and released the code for a computer virus, erected fake architectural heritage signs, run media campaigns for non-existent action movies (United We Stand), and even convinced the entire populace of that Nike had purchased the city's historic Karlsplatz and was about to rename it "Nikeplatz". They stole art, and stole other artists’ names, went to Chernobyl and faked suicide in Chatroulette. Their controversial performances, often bordering on illegality, have been widely discussed in the media earning them the name “Bonnie and Clyde of Contemporary Art”.

ABOUT THE GALLERY Postmasters Gallery opened in East Village in December 1984, moved to Soho Postmasters Gallery in 1989 and in September 1998 the gallery relocated its current ground floor 459 West 19th Street space in Chelsea. Postmasters is the primary gallery for all the represented New York, NY 10011 artists. During its 28 years Postmasters is showing young and established artists USA of all media actively seeking new forms of creative expression and showing them in a context of painting, sculpture and photography. Postmasters is widely Contact: considered a pioneer of focusing attention on new media art which began with - Magda Sawon / Owner now seminal - exhibition “Can you Digit? In 1996. Painters (Steve Mumford, T: 212.727.3323 David Diao, Adam Cvijanovic), sculptors (David Herbert, Monica Cook), E: [email protected] installation artists (Diana Cooper , Sally Smart), and artists for whom form follows W: www.postmastersart.com conceptual ideas (William Powhida, Holly Zausner, Mary Kelly) are represented along the video and new media artists like Katarzyna Kozyra, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Eddo Stern, Guy Ben-Ner, Anthony Goicolea, Kristin Lucas, Federico Solmi, Eva and Franco Mattes, Wolfgang Staehle, and Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung.