Every website is a monument

At the Gloria Maria Gallery, Greek artist Angelo Plessas treats websites as real places.

In his work Angelo Plessas combines animated drawings with domain names to create websites. He treats websites as places where we can imagine and experience objects, the same way we can admire a sculpture in a public space. This becomes particularly urgent at a time when we live part of our lives online, questioning and often blurring what is private and what is public. So visiting a website becomes as public as visiting a traditional monument. At the same time the artist is fascinated with traditional monuments because they engage us with symbols of nostalgic tension. In this way websites suggest a new kind of monumentality where notions of classical time and space are being questioned. "Every website is a monument" is a project consisting in an participatory website installation, a street sign, a monument and some postacrds. In the gallery a big sign will be installed and one of the artist's website will be projected on it. This big sign will became a screen for the projection of a monument, making us think about the theme of what is real, what is proposed, what is a real proposal or a fake projection. The installation features also a series of postcards, created with stills from Google Maps Street Views, which show some locations in the city of Milan and associated virtual "offline" monuments, that represent a three- dimensional and sculptural versions of Plessas' websites. The gallery itself becomes a sort of virtual location, such as a computer does.

Angelo Plessas' website AllDayDoingNothing.com will be hosted and projected, from the 1st to the 13th of February 2011, on the external façade of the Triennale Bovisa's forecourt, in via Lambruschini 31.