Cloaque — a collaborative, Exquisite corpse-style digital art project from Carlos Sáez and Claudia Maté — just celebrated its 2nd anniversary.
“314,377 pixels are a lot, 464 posts are a lot, 67 artists are a lot — but two years mean nothing, specially when talking about a never ending project,” Cloaque’s Sáez and Maté tell ANIMAL. Artists in Cloaque created original vertical artworks as connected panels (posted as sequential Tumblr posts), with each contributor’s piece seamlessly flowing into the next.
Over the two years, Cloaque has seen some necessary modifications. “Maybe the most significant one is in our navigation,” Cloaque says. “We replaced the infinite scroll for page division.” Previously, your browser would die after ten artists’ work had loaded. There was just too many hyper-detailed landscapes and cascading gif collages.
“We are happy to announce that CLOAQUE IS NOW BROWSER-FRIENDLY! Every computer will now be able to tour the whole column without perishing in the attempt.” There’s also a map for international navigation.
“We are very happy to see how it grows (in all aspects) and how it can develop in multiple formats,” Cloaque says. “Our first anniversary project cloaque.mov, the exquisite corpse in audiovisual format has now become a parallel project.”
Last year, Cloaque was manifested into flesh-space via Art F City’s project at UNTITLED as a physical scroll with the work of 40 artists who participated in Cloaque between January 2012 to June 2013, printed on 265 feet of Tyvek.
“We were very happy with Cloaque’s first real life contact during the Miami Art Week, so we decided to repeat the experience for our 2nd anniversary party,” Cloaque says.
“The event took place at Pelonio’s studio, an amazing tunnel in the underground at heart of Madrid. Very appropriate for what happened inside it, in our opinion. We presented the gif group show I FIVE YOU and invited MHSR to perform as part of their European Tour 2014, who turned the place into some kind of End-of-the-World simulator. Just amazing.”
I FIVE YOU is yet another way for Cloaque to promote artists — “the same way we do in the website. We asked a few people from the Cloaque family to redesign our logo in gif format. The show was presented IRL as part of our anniversary event. The gifs appear randomly on the top of our website.”
You’re also seeing a few of them on this page.
Cloaque was conceived as “a digital landfill.” Now that it’s two, it’s a valuable, ongoing collection of work and a dynamic platform for digital collaboration. Not bad for a website named after a bird’s asshole-combination-vagina.
(Lead Image: Kim Laughton; GIFs: Nicolas Sassoon, Anthony Antonellis, Lorna Mills, Rollin Leonard, Claudia Mate)
