Bright Paradise is the inaugural Auckland Art Gallery triennial. The working thesis of Bright Paradise is that New Zealand is peculiarly well suited as a place from which to speculate on the disturbing beauty of artificial paradises and the fateful allure of utopian desire.
The historical imagination in New Zealand is illuminated by dreams of long white clouds and natural bounty, by memories of Pacific plenty, South Seas utopias and burst South Sea bubbles. Located geographically in the South Pacific, but imaginatively split between visions of local and global culture, New Zealand has distinctive perspectives on the rich mix of beauty and anxiety that characterise contemporary speculations about paradise and history.
Such speculations uncover metaphors of our contemporary world caught between an exhilarating desire for experience, information and discovery on the one hand, and a powerful sense of our having corrupted history and destroyed any oceanic sublime or garden paradise, on the other.
Allan Smith, Curator, Contemporary Art.
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It is not only in the Pacific that the culture of electronic communication ghosts its ether with dreams of ocean journeys. For all its celebration of the new, global cyberculture is replete with metaphors of maritime adventure: from cybernauts and data pirates to netscape navigators and fluid identities, from surfing and cruising the dataflows to immersion in the bitstream, trolling shoals of information and exploring 'islands in the net'.
Nigel Clark, "Sea of Islands/Oceans of Data", Panda #8, July 1999
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