Constant Dullaart (NL, 1979) is a Dutch conceptual artist, media artist, and curator. He is founding professor of Networked Materialities at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg, and director of Distant.Gallery, a non-profit foundation and online platform running on the self-initiated social exhibition platform common.garden.

Dullaart’s practice explores how social and cultural values reverberate in tools and technology. He creates works that emphasize an enjoyable friction between old and new, manual and automated, online and offline, real and not. He deconstructs and analyzes the specific human circumstances under which technological instruments are created, and how this influences the way they are consequently used. Revisiting his research into neural networks, he probes how phenomena like glossolalia and apophenia can create a bridge between person and technology.

Rapid Response Project

For Phase 1 of Rapid Response, Dullaart explored new modes of social media and connection in a time of social distancing and isolation through the platform titled, Common Garden. The artist reconfigured and rebuilt social media formats to set up a series of venues for casual social interaction– bars, community spaces, institutions, meeting rooms, and more. These encounters occur in conditions reminiscent of “real life,” without the need to make an appointment or create accounts that reveal one’s identity and personal information to a large tech company.