Petzel is pleased to present Downloadable, an online exhibition that offers works available for free and unlimited download, contributed by Petzel artists. The show explores ideas of looking, ownership, and originality as art experiences have been forced into the digital realm. We now find ourselves drowning in emails touting various iterations of virtual exhibitions, walk throughs, viewing rooms, and art fairs. With our pleasure of seeing works in person disrupted, the notion of looking at art has radically shifted. While the digital files may be the same for all visitors, the experience and context surrounding each download is different, and as a result a new unique work is created for the viewer every time. Petzel is grateful for our artists’ contributions with offerings from GIFs, to collages, to poetry, photographs, audio files, screenplays and beyond.
 
Stephen Prina presents Threatening Danger, Fear, Catastrophe, a video animation of a rhythmic light sequence, looping in perpetuity. Once imagined as a public artwork, it incorporates lampposts that shine in two different ways. The title is a reference to Schönberg's symphonic poem Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, first realized as a film score by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub in the 1972 film Introduction to Arnold Schönberg's "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene."  Flattened through their digitization, the sculptural qualities and textures of Rezi van Lankveld’s collage and drawing transform into something new. Thomas Eggerer’s original Drawing for Yellow Harvest #4 was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy leaving behind only a digital trace – here, as part of the exhibition, its jpeg finds a poetic afterlife. Several artists request collaboration on the downloader’s part: Jorge Pardo has begun the process of adding color to a painting, and invites the downloader to complete the composition; Christian Jankowski calls for participation in his new work Jankowski 4.0, by requesting that viewers create a Dada Poem via an online Poetry Generator and film themselves reading it. The video is then to be posted on Instagram using the hashtag #Jankowski4.0; Allan McCollum offers ever-evolving insight into his practice and requires viewers to take their own screenshots from his new website as a form of downloading. Through an array of experiences, Downloadable bends the definition of collecting an artist’s work and experiencing an exhibition today. 

Downloadable includes work by Yael Bartana, Walead Beshty, Ross Bleckner, Simon Denny, Keith Edmier, Thomas Eggerer, Robert Heinecken, Dana Hoey, Christian Jankowski, Sean Landers, Rezi van Lankveld, Allan McCollum, Jorge Pardo, Seth Price, Stephen Prina, Jon Pylypchuk, Willem de Rooij, Pieter Schoowerth, John Stezaker, and Hiroki Tsukuda.

Keith Edmier
Virtual Reality
1988–1990
Originally recorded on VHS tape then digitized as a MOV file
7:41 min
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Stephen Prina
Threatening Danger, Fear, Catastrophe
2020
GIF
Animation: Devon McDonald-Hyman
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Stephen Prina presents Threatening Danger, Fear, Catastrophe, a video animation of a rhythmic light sequence, looping in perpetuity. Once imagined as a public artwork, it incorporates lampposts that shine in two different ways. The title is a reference to Schönberg's symphonic poem Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, first realized as a film score by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub in the 1972 film Introduction to Arnold Schönberg's "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene."

Pieter Schoolwerth
Shifted Sims #6 (Tropical Romance Island Community Event)
2020
GIF
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Schoolwerth's paintings utilize a unique 3D relief "infrastructure" – he first photographs 3D models (composed off of a Sims 4 screenshot), embeds the matching fragments of the screenshot back into the model in photoshop, prints the file out on canvas, and applies paint on top. These gifs illuminate Schoolwerth’s process and connect the model to the finished painting, allowing viewers to better understand his technique.

Pieter Schoolwerth
Shifted Sims #17 (Wicked WooHoo Sex Mod)
2020
GIF
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Pieter Schoolwerth
Shifted Sims #17 (Influencer Career)
2020
GIF
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Pieter Schoolwerth
Waiting Room
2017
GIF
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Robert Heinecken
Revised Magazine Portfolio: American The Violent
1993
Re-collated Magazine Pages
GIF
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A series of diptychs from Robert Heinecken presented here as a unique GIF.  The work opens with a Time Magazine cover image that Heinecken coupled with a passage from French writer, André Breton. The cover perfectly captures early 90's distress about crime in America and the re-collated pages that follow in the inserted folio come from editorial features gathered from a variety of magazines of that time period. Some of the images are quite benign on their own but come across as menacing subsequent to the title page.

Walead Beshty
Unmaskings [1925-2012: Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Face of Another (1966), Mission: Impossible (1966), Mission: Impossible (1970), Mission: Impossible (1971), unknown (1971), Lupin III (1972), Smokey the Bear (1973),  Fantastic Journey (1977), Dominique is Dead (1980), V (1983), Miller Lite: The Case of the Missing Case (1986), If Tomorrow Comes (1986), Hell Squad (1986), Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light (1987), Beetlejuice (1988), Naked Gun (1988), American Ninja 3 (1989), Cheers (1989), Darkman (1990), Ferris Bueller (1990), RoboCop 2 (1990), Total Recall (1990), Popcorn (1991), Steel and Lace (1991), Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), Droopy: Master Detective (1993), Droopy: Master Detective (1993), Darkman II: The Return of Durant (1995), Megaman (1995), Snackwell’s (1996), Waffle Crisp (1996), FX (1996), Fired Up (1997), Outlaw Star (1997), Michael Jackson’s Ghosts (1997), Men in Black (1997), Sony MiniDisc (1998), Omnitel (1998), Subaru (1998), Charlie’s Angels (2000), Diabolik (2000), La Femme Nikita (2000), Road to Ruin (2000), Passions (2001), BBC (2001), Monkeybone (2001), Alias (2001), Mutant X (2001), Master of Disguise (2002), Pepsi Twist (2002), Kekkaishi (2003), Average Joe (2003), Britney Spears’s Toxic (2003), Cariot (2004), Bleach (2004), Mission: Impossible III (2006), Red Remo (2006), Pushing Daisies (2007), Carlsberg (2007), Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu (2008), Old Spice (2009), Camaleones (2009), Salt (2010), Days of Our Lives (2011), Toyota Corolla (2011), Players (2012)]
2020
Digital video file
Color, sound, 41:06 min
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Walead Beshty contributes a compilation of YouTube clips of people taking masks off. 

Christian Jankowski
Jankowski 4.0
2020
Video and poem
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In his new work Jankowski 4.0, Christian Jankowski invites the viewers to use the text from the Petzel invitation E-Mail for the Downloadable exhibition as a basis to create a Dada Poem via an online Poetry Generator. Viewers are then requested to film themselves reading their poem and post it on Instagram using the hashtag #Jankowski4.0.

Allan McCollum
Artist Statement Website
2020
VIEW HERE

Allan McCollum offers ever-evolving insight into his practice with his Artist Statement Website, which creates, at random, over 146,849,472 possible artist statements, appearing with no predictability. He invites viewers to take their own screenshots from the site as a form of downloading. The above video is merely a brief sample of these many combinations, please click "View Here" to see the full website.