Drawing on the development of digital technology and networks, the artists in the exhibition consider and critique the online information economy that governs our daily life; and raise important questions about the commercial exploitation of personal information, and compromised autonomy as a result of Big Tech.

The title, ‘Information wants to be free’, references an aphorism made by Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, at a hackers conference in 1984 when he referred to how the emergence of digital technology enabled information to disseminate easily and escape proprietary barriers. Soon after in 1989, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web advanced the desire to create free open access to information, encapsulating the idealism at the heart of digital free culture.

33 years on, we have another perspective on what it means for information to be free. While giving away services which appear to be without cost, technology companies spy on users, collecting data about who they are and what they do online, ungoverned by any kind of moral conduct or universal law.

Curated by Kristine Tan, the show features an international and multigenerational group of artists who engage with a variety of medium such as installation, sound and video, to explore early ideas of a free global exchange of information, and the issues surrounding an internet that can no longer claim to be democratic or neutral.

While technology is not inherently malevolent, the exhibition urges us to look beyond the dominant tech-utopian narrative to consider the role personal data plays in the restructuring of power and wealth in the digital age, and the need to return to the internet’s origins of an open, neutral system that services a flow of information free from exploitation.