Speaking about the recent revolutionary events in the Arab world, Eben Moglen lecturer in law and legal history at Columbia University and a leader of the open source movement recently stated:

“Mr. Mubarak and his advisers thought that if you turn off the Internet, you turn off the Internet generation. That was wrong.... It’s not the technology that makes it work, it’s that human beings have figured out something about society if they grow up in the net.[1]

What Moglen describes here is the Internet mind; a mind that is never offline. In the same way that there is no longer ‘virtual reality’, there is just Reality that is mediated by technology. The images and sculptural forms that the five artists participating in Offline create may be viewed very much in this light. The Internet is everywhere, so embedded in society that it is impossible for it not to pollinate all art on some level. In its utter ubiquity and dominance on our phenomenological and linguistic narratives, online now exists offline, and images, text and signs now exist in an informational ecosystem. This exhibition, though it does not feature a single screen or computer, is a product of this all- embracing global network which has changed and will continue to change the way we live and communicate, and consequently how artistic dialogues are carried out.

Alexandra Domanovićwas born in former Yugoslavia in 1981. The 1991 break up of her homeland came only a few months after the country's top level domain had been registered and internet use began to spread. Domanovićs sculptural works, made from thousands ofpages of printed paper in stacks, were produced to commemorate the recent abolition of the .yu domain.

Joel Holmberg visualizes the man-altered landscape as stretching into the online world. He often  describes this approach as network topography, an understanding of the digital landscape, its inhabitants, and how they have established their presence in this environment. Finding inspiration in corporate residue, Holmberg uses printer ink, styrofoam packaging, online services, and marketing tools as a way to make unique experiences within a business environment.
Parker Ito’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the 53rd Venice Biennale, the 10th Lyon Biennale, the Pacific Film Archive, along with recent solo exhibitions for The Adobe Books Backroom Gallery and Firefox's Add-Art project.  Parker, sometimes referred to as PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP, is the co-founder of JstChillin.org, a collaborative curatorial project and the CEO of PaintFX.biz.  His work, the most infamous girl in the history of the Internet was made when Ito asked orderartwork.com to create a series of paintings based on a stock photo depicting a smiling, blonde female wearing a backpack which (amongst its other usages) a “parked domain” company called Demand Media employs to catch the eye of Web surfers who accidentally click to the sites it owns. The resulting work–The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet–exists as both these made-to-order paintings as well as a heavily re-blogged Web meme.

Eilis McDonald is a Dublin based artist who assembles environments using found objects both online and offline, searching for the sublime and ethereal by seeking out the spiritual and subliminal. In this she recontextualises discarded artefacts of the local into a visceral and immersive networked reality. McDonald is interested in the ‘numinous presence’ of objects and the intangible energy and forces that permeate them. Her work is a collision of cultural references and personal motivations, manipulated to form a sensorial unit which snaps together in unpredictable and serendipitous ways. For Offline, she will be using the work of the other artists as a constituent material of her gallery installation.

Jon Rafman's exhibit Nine Eyes of Google Street View both celebrates Google’s technologies and critiques the culture and consciousness it reflects.  In narrative film essays constructed out of Google Earth and Street View imagery, one man searches for his lost love through Google Street View and Google Earth and in a second film, mystery surrounds an anonymous Google Street driver, the new unrecognized ‘worker” of the post-industrial age. A series of photographs captured by chance by the roving Google vehicle depict individuals in a variety of contemporary landscapes revealing our modern experience. When Rafman reframes a Google Street View, he reintroduces the human gaze and reasserts the uniqueness and importance of the individual.