The LIMA collection is an amalgamation of a selection of media artworks and installations from the late sixties up to the present day. After years of selecting existing works, LIMA now for the first time asked an artist to create a new work of art based on this rich historical collection.
LIMA is thrilled to announce that Jonas Lund was the first to accept the challenge. For his work For Preview Only, Lund appropriated all the ‘For Preview Only’ files of the LIMA collection. The artist downloaded all the 2336 artworks from LIMA’s online catalogue by analysing the website (li-ma.nl/site/catalogue), and ended up with a total amount of 463,8 hours of material – all the full length files with a ‘For Preview Only’ watermark. The artist re-encoded the files into an online work of 24 hours. In exactly a day, the sound and image of all the works from the LIMA collection rapidly pass by. Questions about visibility, appropriation and authorship are addressed in a light and playful manner. For Preview Only is an online piece, but Lund removed the ability to skip forward. While fully built with and relying on digital and online tools, For Preview Only cannot be influenced and managed by the viewer. This makes the work more related to broadcasting media, like television. Lund plays a game with both his medium and his audience, wherein various disciplines are cleverly intermixed.
Inviting Jonas Lund to be the first artist to generate work starting from the collection was a logic choice. The fact that the Amsterdam-based artist often works with data, and especially information and statistics from the art world, made him the perfect candidate. Lund creates his work on and with help of computers and the Internet. His work is unmistakably embedded in the digital era.
For Preview Only is an online on-going work synchronised to the clock. The artworks from the LIMA collection will always be shown on the same hour of the day (or night). One will need a full day of his/her life to watch the LIMA collection…
