Contemporary Semantics Beta emphasizes the use of the internet as a source of materials and ideas, as well as the semantics that has developed because of this. How, for example, has the democratization of video by websites like Youtube.com influenced our visual literacy, and how are websites such as wikipedia.com accepted as truth and used for inspiration? How do images found through search engines and the key words used to find them, play a role in contemporary art? In what ways do these developments influence the artists and their work?

This exhibition presents the artworks side by side with the references or sources of inspiration that led to those works. In this way, an attempt is made to place these works in the contexts in which they were conceived. These contexts have often been researched and discussed in detail using online social tools such as delicious.com.

Many of the artists in this exhibition mostly make medium specific work in a neo-conceptual vein online. Those works are often best seen at home, on a computer screen. Contemporary Semantics Beta, however, explicitly presents a choice of physical works by these artists. Yet the main preoccupations of the research into a developing image language remains clear in this exhibition. How do artists deal with the enormous amount of crap and specialized information available on the internet, and how self-conscious is this developing visual practice of filtering, recycling and (re)contextualization? And what role do the existing visual arts play in this process?