As long as possible

In the early 1990s Juha van Ingen made pieces that play with the characteristics of the VHS support, based on the phenomena of deterioration (Dis)integrator (1992), or engaging in more general reflections on how duration is captured by time-based media with the 1996 installation – an accumulation of VHS cassettes covering a total recording duration of one year, in their original packaging. 

In the late 1990s, he made a reputation for himself by producing several works online that explore the potentialities of the Internet navigator as an artistic medium, linking the history of modernity and the theory of media. Within this corpus, the work entitled Web-Safe (1999-2000), recently acquired by the National Museum of Modern Art, is certainly the most radical piece. Sustained by a vision of the history of monochrome and American structural film, this Internet site presents a succession of perfect digital flat tints, parsing the 212 hexadecimal colour codes that the first generations of Internet Navigator could reproduce with precision. This contemplative work that is purely specific to his medium does not propose images read by a navigator, but produced by it, in a consideration of the distribution of online images, the standardisation of the visible and the limits of copyright. 

These structural questions concerning net art, then the post-Internet scene, go side by side in Juha van Ingen's work with a reflection on technological obsolescence and the Sisyphean character of attempts to overcome it. Whether through a.gif file that lasts 1,000 years, As Long as Possible (2015-2017), or works flirting with science fiction that he films with an old mobile telephone, Juha van Ingen confronts the recent past and the unfathomable future in a form of technological sublime.