HEADER IMAGE First To Go (2023) by Sam Keelan
PHOTOGRAPHY Studio Adamson
Long before Wi-Fi was free and doomscrolling was private, there was the Internet café: sticky shared keyboards, dial-up patience, MSN tabs carefully hidden from the guy at the counter. INTERNET CAFE, the new free exhibition opened to the public on Friday 30th January, taps into that collective sentimentality, bringing our teenage digital dreams to the heart of central London after a buzzy private view the night before.
Presented by Hypha Studios and curated by Juliet Wilson, the 17-artist show takes over No.1 Poultry, the postmodern landmark once crowned “one of London’s ugliest buildings” and now reclaimed as the perfect backdrop for nostalgic affection and playful critique. “The internet is a super weird space right now,” Wilson explains. “Ms Algorithm has come along and made things a bit iffy. It’s become an extremely huge part of polarising people, and has been enabling some really scary opinions.”
She contrasts today’s internet with its early promise in the 2000s, a time of “exciting new developments pinging up everywhere for the new millennium” that still felt “simple and harmlessly dumb.” That shift became the catalyst for the exhibition.
Across painting, sculpture, photography, print and installation, INTERNET CAFE reflects on the gadgets and gestures silently erased by technological acceleration. The works of Honey Baker, Lily Bloom, Naomi Boiko-Stapleton, Charlie Chesterman, Eva Dixon, Olivia England, Archie Fooks-Smith, Elliot Fox, Harry Freegard, Sam Keelan, Max King, Sam King, Yuming Lu, Judy Maxwell-McNicol, Nell Mitchell, Faye Rita Robinson and Georgia Semple present landline phones, The Yellow Pages and iPods not as retro novelties, but as emotional artefacts, using nostalgia as a tool to question how intimacy and autonomy function in a screen-mediated world.
A lot of the work is playful, applying humour or irony, which I’ve always been drawn to. As humans, we’re all just a bit silly, really.
Juliet Wilson
Wilson’s own relationship to this transitional period underpins the show. “I am a Zillennial,” she notes. “I grew up with The Sims, flip phones and Furbies; I was chatting with someone at the exhibition opening about Furbies being extremely vocal animals.” She laughs, recalling the sudden chaos of a silent family computer room interrupted by a Furby cry of “Kah mee-mee noo-loo” (“me very happy”).
The exhibition’s ethos is echoed among the artists themselves, an eclectic yet tightly considered group. “They’re a super talented bunch, but also really solid individuals,” Wilson says. “Their practices range from repurposed industrial materials to trompe-l’œil and faux stone applications, with creative outlets spanning fashion and music. A lot of the work is playful, applying humour or irony, which I’ve always been drawn to. As humans, we’re all just a bit silly, really.”
A dedicated installation completes the exhibition, assembling authentic pre-2010 items into a plastic-filled memorial that equally resembles a shrine and a slightly sad cultural landfill, like the last Tamagotchi feeding before the plug is pulled. Camp yet considered, INTERNET CAFE doesn’t just remember the past; it flirts with its afterlife, and conserves the moments we didn’t realise were already slipping away.
INTERNET CAFE is open until 7th March at Hypha Gallery 1, EC2R 8EN.
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