Napster

by DAMJANSKI


location: Charles P. Rogers, 26 W 17th St, NYC


Thursday, June 22, 2023 4 - 7pm

What better place to premiere Damjanski's Napster app than at a famous artisanal bed and mattress showroom? Napster is an Augmented Reality iPhone app that allows users to explore their surroundings to select a cozy spot for Damjanski to take a virtual nap. The app reveals potential nap locations for Damjanski by placing a 3D model of the artist sleeping in the space. We invite you to this very special event on June 22 to be the first to engage with Damjanski's most recent project by choosing a spot for the artist to take a comfy snooze.

Damjanski is a widely recognized digital artist who calls himself an 'artist living in a browser'. Concerned with themes of power, poetry and participation, he had been exploring the concept of apps as artworks since 2008. His recent app MBye Bye Camera is a camera for the post-human era which he created during the pandemic in 2021. Every photo taken with the app automatically removes any human that might have been photographed. Damjanski's digital photographs from the series Post-Human Dog made with Bye Bye Camera and shown at Postmasters exhibition, Machine Violence, depicted dogs on their leashes, with humans effectively 'disappeared' out of the image and context. In 2018, Damjanski co-founded MoMAR, an Augmented Reality gallery app aimed at democratizing physical exhibition spaces, art institutions and curatorial processes within New York's Museum of Modern Art. WIRED covered the launch of the app with the headline 'Augmented Reality Is Transforming Museums'. The app Never Not There virtually transformed the ZKM museum in Karlsruhe, Germany and into a new space for visitors to explore. In 2017, he created an online space that only programs can access. This software performance, called Humans not invited, first hit Reddit's front page before it was shown at the König Galerie in Berlin, Germany. His work has appeared internationally, including exhibitions at ZKM Karlsruhe, NRW-Forum, Postmasters, König Galerie, Roehrs & Boetsch, Pioneer Works. Currently Damjanski resides in New York.